Some 80 people are feared to have drowned while 24 were rescued by coast guard vessels. On Wednesday five migrants died and more than 500 were rescued when an overcrowded fishing boat capsized – also off the Libyan coast.
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The coastguard, which coordinates rescue operations in the area, was not able to immediately provide further information about the latest incident.
Altogether, the missions bring the total number of refugees rescued from the Mediterranean to more than 7,000 since Monday.
Migrants on the stricken vessel off Libya. Many of them can not swim and have no life jackets, with people smugglers sending them off on flimsy and overcrowded vessels.
Migrants come to Calais hoping make it to the United Kingdom by boat across the English Channel or in a vehicle or truck through the tunnel connecting the two countries. The boat rolled, then sank.
In this image taken from video, Mohammed Ali, from Sudan, looks at an Italian Navy video showing the capsizing of a boat he was on during an interview with the Associated Press in Siculiana, in Sicily, Italy, Friday, May 27, 2016.
The Italian operation was one of two dozen rescues underway.
Amid the catastrophes at sea, police in Greece were finishing the evacuation of the squalid Idomeni refugee camp on the border with Macedonia that had become a symbol of human suffering and chaos as Europe struggles with its worst migrant crisis since World War II. On May 23 and 24, about 5,600 migrants were rescued by Italian authorities.
Italian navy ship Vega recovered 45 bodies near a sinking rubber vessel close to Libya on Friday.
“The people below can’t see nothing, can’t see nothing, but when they heard, they started coming up.They wanted to be saved, too”.
Horrific scenes of people clinging desperately to the upturned boat or dropping into the sea were caught on camera.
Col. Ayoub Gassim said they were found in two groups: one of 550 near the western coast city of Sabratha and the second of 216 off Zwara.
The survivors of the first shipwreck, which happened Wednesday, said some 650 people were aboard their boat when it left chaos-wracked Libya.
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Sea Watch spokeswoman Ruby Hartbrich said in a statement that from the two capsized boats they saw, around 150 were on it and as many as 100 might have died.
