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Local public prosecutor Salvatore Vella confirmed media reports
that four people who survived the shipwreck told rescuers they
were on a boat carrying 45 people, including three children.
Vella's office has opened an investigation into the incident.
The 7-metre-long boat set off on Thursday morning from Tunisia's
Sfax, a hot spot in the migration crisis, but capsized and sank
after a few hours when hit by a big wave, the survivors were
quoted as saying by Italian news agency Ansa.
The Sea-Watch charity rescue group said one of its surveillance
planes spotted them being rescued by a cargo ship. They were
then transferred onto an Italian coast guard vessel and
disembarked in Lampedusa, where they shared their story.
"They said they were among the few aboard (the sunken boat) with
a life jacket, and (after the shipwreck) they remained in the
water until they found another empty boat", Sea-Watch said in a
statement.
The migrants arrived in Lampedusa exhausted and in a state of
shock, and are due to be questioned by police, prosecutor Vella
said. They are presumed to have spent several days adrift at sea
with no food or drinking water.
The Italian coast guard did not respond to a request for
comment.
A source with knowledge of the matter said it was unlikely that
the shipwreck experienced by the survivors was one of two the
coast guard had reported on Sunday.
At the time, the coast guard said they had rescued 57 people and
recovered two bodies, amid media reports that at least one of
the sunken boats had also set off from Sfax on Thursday.
Separately, Tunisian authorities said on Monday that they had
recovered 11 bodies from a shipwreck near Sfax on Sunday, with
44 migrants still missing from that sinking.
Italy, a major route into Europe for hundreds of thousands of
asylum seekers and other migrants, has seen an increase in
migrant boats so far this year, with around 93,750 migrant
arrivals by sea according to interior ministry data.
The figure compared with about 44,950 arrivals in the same
period of 2022.
(Writing by Federico Maccioni and Federica Urso, Editing by
Keith Weir, Crispian Balmer, Alexandra Hudson)
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