8 dead as Italy nears new record for migrant rescues

At least eight people died and an unknown number were missing as a new series of Mediterranean boat dramas left Italy on the verge of a record number of migrant arrivals.
Confirming the latest fatalities in what is already a record year for migrant deaths in the Mediterranean, Italy's coastguard told AFP that 1,400 people had been saved in 12 separate operations between yesterday evening and today afternoon.
The rescues will take the number of migrants to have arrived in Italy by sea this year to almost 170,000, a whisker short of the previous record set in 2014.
A coastguard boat recovered seven bodies and oversaw the rescue of 182 people from a stricken rubber dinghy in waters off Libya.

The other confirmed victim, a man, died on the Topaz Responder, a boat operated by Malta-based charity MOAS with a Red Cross medical team onboard.
MOAS said survivors' accounts suggested that "many" people were unaccounted for, including the mother of two children who survived.

The organisation said it had help rescue some 600 people in four difficult operations, including 117 from one sinking dinghy.
The vessel of choice for people traffickers operating out of Libya, such dinghies typically have between 120 and 150 migrants crammed onto them.
"The doctors managed to revive several people with hypothermia but it was too late for one of them," MOAS spokeswoman Maria Teresa Sette told AFP.

Among the survivors were two in a critical state awaiting evacuation to the outlying Italian island of Lampedusa.
The coastguard said the 12 stricken boats assisted in the latest rescues included one larger wooden vessel that was was carrying 450-500 people, six smaller wooden boats with a few dozen people on board and five dinghies.
Unusually, the survivors included "many families" from Syria, according to MOAS, as well as people from the Palestinian territories, Lebanon and Sudan.
Of late, migrants leaving Libya have been overwhelmingly from sub-Saharan or East Africa with a much-anticipated surge in the numbers of refugees from Syria's war having failed to materialise following the de facto closure of the Turkey-Greece migrant route earlier this year.

The latest victims will add to a total of 4,655 migrants confirmed to have died or disappeared in the Mediterranean so far this year, according to counts by the International Organisation for Migration and the UN refugee agency.