The Italian coastguard said on Monday it was carrying out a rescue operation involving two fishing boats with a total of 1,200 passengers on board, as the number of people attempting to cross the Mediterranean from north Africa surged over the weekend.
One vessel carrying about 800 people was more than 120 miles (190 km) south-east of the Sicilian city of Syracuse, the coastguard said.
The other, with 400 people on board, is in the Ionian sea off the coast of Calabria.
Alarm Phone, a hotline service for migrants in distress at sea, said on Sunday morning that it had received a call from the second boat, which had set sail from Tobruk in Libya and was in Maltese waters. It said on Twitter that the boat had run out of fuel and was taking on water, which the passengers were trying bail out. It re-established contact with the boat overnight, with people reporting strong winds and high waves.
The German NGO Sea-Watch International, which had located the second boat with one of its planes, said on Monday that a merchant ship had provided it with fuel and water, but alleged that Maltese authorities had issued an order not to rescue the passengers. The NGO tweeted that the boat was struggling in waves of up to 1.5 metres (five feet).
The Italian coastguard, which has rescued about 2,000 people since Friday, said the latest operation had been complicated by the difficult conditions. Twenty-six boats arrived at the island of Lampedusa on Sunday with 974 people on board, mostly from The Gambia, Ivory Coast, Guinea and Burkina Faso.
Four people died and at least 23 were reported missing on Saturday after their boat sank off Tunisia. Fifty-three other people were rescued from the same vessel off the southern city of Sfax.
Dozens of others have died or gone missing in other incidents in recent weeks off Tunisia, which has overtaken Libya as the main departure point for people seeking asylum in Europe.
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Italy’s foreign minister, Antonio Tajani, told the foreign press association in Rome last week that more than 15,000 people had arrived in Italy by boat from Tunisia since the start of the year. He said the EU needed to make a financial aid deal with Tunisia to safeguard its economy.
Ninety-three people died when the boat they were travelling sank in rough seas off Cutro, a beach town in Calabria, in late February. The vessel had left Turkey four days earlier.
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