Rescuers searched Friday for around 50 migrants feared drowned after their boat sank off the coast of the southern Italian island of Lampedusa overnight, Italian rescue services said.
The coastguard called on private vessels and teams from local deep-sea diving centres to join the search.
The Italian coastguard and nearby NATO ships rescued 56 people from the sea after receiving a distress call from the sinking boat, which survivors said had been carrying 136 people including 10 women and six children.
Coastguard spokesman Filippo Marini said one body had been found and that the search would continue “as long as there is hope of finding survivors”.
Those rescued, including one woman, “are in good health, although they are suffering from hypothermia”, after hours in the water, Marini said.
Some were plucked from the waters off the islet of Lampione, while others had made it ashore.
The survivors, apparently all Tunisians, were taken to a nearby reception centre on Lampedusa, off Italy’s southernmost tip.
A passenger on the boat gave the alarm in a satellite phone call late Thursday, saying they were sinking about 12 nautical miles off Lampedusa, the Italian island closest to the coast of north Africa.
Coast guard and police vessels as well as NATO helicopters and ships from Italy, Germany and Turkey joined the search for survivors.
NATO’s southern command in Naples acted after a request by Italian authorities, NATO said in a statement from Brussels.
“The three NATO ships and their helicopters have located two people and took them on board for treatment,” said the alliance.
The first people were pulled from the sea around 2:30 am (0030 GMT), while some managed to swim to the islet. Two were rescued by a German NATO ship while one exhausted migrant was flown to land by helicopter.
So far however there has been no sign of the wrecked boat.
Some Italian media reports have speculated whether it quickly sank or may have been towed back to Tunisia by a “mother boat”, which could have taken the remaining migrants with it.
Prosecutors in Agrigento, southern Sicily, have opened an inquiry into whether there were people traffickers on board and, if so, whether these were among the survivors.
But UN refugee agency spokeswoman Laura Boldrini said: “The idea of people smugglers is by now obsolete.
“Today it is the migrants themselves who take turns in sailing the boat. They are often people with no maritime experience.”
Save the Children Italy said five children had survived.
It called on “national and international authorities to make every effort to reinforce and multiply prevention initiatives” to stop migrants attempting the crossing.
Rights group Amnesty International also expressed its concern.
“Once again, the waters around the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa have played host to a tragedy, highlighting that the number of people dying on Europe’s doorstep is still increasing,” it said.
The island’s mayor, Giusi Nicolini, said she was “deeply saddened for the victims of the tragedy”, the latest in a long line of shipwrecks in the area.
She warned against “getting used to these tragedies, to the idea that in today’s world crossing the Mediterranean in search of a job or a decent life is tantamount to playing Russian roulette”.
Each year thousands of illegal migrants, mostly from Africa, cross the Mediterranean Sea in overcrowded and makeshift boats to land in Lampedusa seeking to enter Europe.
According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, at least 280 people have lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean this year.
-Vanguard