According to stories from survivors who have recently arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa, 41 migrants died in a shipwreck that occurred last week in the central Mediterranean, according to the Ansa news agency on Wednesday.
Four survivors of the shipwreck, according to Ansa, told rescuers they were on a boat with 45 people on it, including three children.
The boat left Sfax, Tunisia, on Thursday morning, a flashpoint in the migration crisis, but capsized and sank after a few hours, according to the survivors.
The survivors, three men and a woman from Ivory Coast and Guinea, said that an Italian coast guard ship relocated them from a cargo ship where they had been rescued.
An inquiry for comments was not immediately answered by the Coast Guard.
Uncertainty existed as to whether the information provided by Ansa was connected to the two shipwrecks that the coast guard had reported on Sunday, when it stated that about 30 people were missing from them.
57 survivors and two bodies have also been found, according to the coast guard, amid media claims that at least one of the sinking boats had left Sfax on Thursday.
Separately, Tunisian authorities reported on Monday that they had found 11 remains from a shipwreck that occurred on Sunday near Sfax, though 44 migrants were still missing.
According to data from the interior ministry that was most recently updated on Monday, 93,700 migrants have arrived by sea in Italy so far this year, as opposed to 44,700 during the same period in 2022.