MADRID AND BEIRUT — Hundreds of migrants are feared drowned in the Mediterranean Sea near Libya, migrant advocates and Italian officials said Tuesday, a grim result of a wave of desperate maritime human smuggling to Italy.
At least 200 migrants are missing after an overloaded boat sank about 30 miles off Libya's coast, where Libyan rescuers recovered at least 23 survivors and 20 corpses Monday, according to the International Organization for Migration in Geneva.
"The rescue operation has ended," said Jemini Pandya, a spokeswoman for the organization. "It doesn't look good."
In another incident, an Italian oil freighter rescued 356 people crammed aboard a boat that was in distress in strong wind and choppy water, Italian officials said.
Other boats may be in trouble. Libyan authorities lost radio contact Saturday night with two vessels, according to migrant advocates, who said it was not clear whether the two were fishing or smuggling boats. The incidents were reported Tuesday morning.
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva said Tuesday that "details were still sketchy" and that "at least" one boat had sunk.
There were reports that a second boat packed with migrants had gone down, said a Red Cross official based in Lampedusa, the tiny Italian island near Tunisia that is a major illegal gateway to Europe.
"We have heard that two boats sank and that the number of missing could be much higher," Laura Rizzello, a Red Cross nurse, said in a telephone interview. "It's a horrible humanitarian tragedy. It sounds like they departed Libya with a rough sea hoping that the weather would improve. The risk is always present that something like this could happen."
The missing and rescued included Egyptians, Tunisians and sub-Saharan Africans, advocates and officials said. Numbers were difficult to pin down because the Libyan and Italian governments provided little information.
The calamity aggravated a furor over smuggling from Libya to southern Italy. The number of illegal immigrants intercepted at sea by Italy doubled last year to about 34,000, most of them arriving in Lampedusa.
Over the weekend, the Italian Coast Guard rescued 222 migrants, mostly Africans and 43 of them Nigerian women, on a boat near Lampedusa, while two vessels carrying about 350 people landed in Sicily.
