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Forty-one migrants, including three children, are feared dead after a shipwreck last week in the Mediterranean, UN agencies said, citing four survivors brought to the Italian island of Lampedusa Wednesday. Their metal boat overturned in bad weather during the night of Thursday to Friday after setting off from the Tunisian port of Sfax, said a joint statement from the UN agencies for refugees, children and migration. The survivors — a 13-year-old boy on his own, a woman and two men — were rescued by a merchant ship and brought to Lampedusa by the Italian coastguard, they said. In a separate statement, the Italian Red Cross, which manages the migrant reception centre on the island, said the four were generally in good health. They said they were from Ivory Coast and Guinea, and were unrelated to the missing migrants, it said. The four managed to survive the shipwreck by floating on inner tubes, before reaching another boat at sea. The shipwreck is one of several deadly incide

At least 30 migrants are missing following two shipwrecks off the Italian island of Lampedusa, according to survivor testimony, the UN’s migration agency said Sunday. Around 28 people were reported lost at sea by survivors on one boat, while three were reported missing from the second, after both went down in stormy weather on Saturday, said the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Both were rickety iron boats believed to have set off from Sfax in Tunisia on Thursday. Cultural mediators with the IOM believed there were “at least 30 people missing” after speaking to the survivors, press officer Flavio Di Giacomo told AFP. An investigation into the shipwrecks has been opened in Agrigento, on the nearby Italian island of Sicily. Agrigento’s chief of police Emanuele Ricifari said the traffickers would have known rough seas were forecast. “Whoever allowed them, or forced them, to leave with this sea is an unscrupulous criminal lunatic,” he told Italian media. “Rough s