The Coast Guard on Tuesday recovered
the bodies of two women thought to be among those missing
following four migrant boat shipwrecks on Monday.
The bodies were spotted in the Italian search and rescue (SAR)
area after an operation to rescue a group of 62 migrants and
refugees including 3 women from a boat in distress.
The group, from Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast,
Guinea, Mali, Sudan and Togo, had departed from Sfax in Tunisia.
The migrants and the two corpses were disembarked in Lampedusa.
The arrival took to 435 the number of people who disembarked on
the tiny Sicilian island between midnight on Tuesday and dawn on
Wednesday in 10 separate landings.
All had reportedly departed from Sfax and paid up to 3,500
Tunisian dinars (over 1,000 euros) for the crossing.
On Tuesday, there were a total of 674 arrivals in 20 landings.
Early on Wednesday there were 2,689 people in the hotspot
against a formal capacity of little under 400.
180 people were due to be transferred to mainland Sicily by
regular ferry later in the morning.
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