IOM: 53 dead or missing after migrant boat capsizes off Libya; two women survive
Fifty-three migrants, including two babies, are dead or missing after a rubber boat carrying 55 people capsized off Libya’s northwest coast, the International Organization for Migration said.
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The boat departed from Zawiya on Thursday and overturned off nearby Zuwara on Friday, according to the IOM, citing accounts from the two survivors. Both are Nigerian women rescued by Libyan authorities during a search-and-rescue operation, the agency said. One woman reported losing her husband; the other said her two babies were swept away in the disaster.
Zawiya and Zuwara lie west of Tripoli along a stretch of coastline long used by smugglers to launch overcrowded, unseaworthy boats toward Europe across the Mediterranean.
The IOM said the latest capsizing adds to a deadly start to the year on the central Mediterranean route. In January alone, at least 375 migrants were reported dead or missing amid multiple “invisible” shipwrecks during extreme weather, with hundreds more deaths believed to have gone unrecorded. With Friday’s incident, the number of people reported dead or missing on the route in 2026 stands at least at 484, the agency said.
The scale of the loss underscores the peril facing people attempting to flee conflict and poverty through Libya, where state collapse and armed groups have enabled a sprawling smuggling economy since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising that toppled Muammar Gaddafi. The country’s fragmented security landscape has also left migrants vulnerable to abuse and detention.
In mid-January, authorities in eastern Libya discovered at least 21 bodies of migrants in a mass grave, according to two security sources. Up to 10 survivors from the group showed signs of having been tortured before they were freed from captivity, the sources said. Two days later, separate security sources said Libyan security forces freed more than 200 migrants from a so-called secret prison in the southeastern town of Kufra, where they had been held in inhuman conditions.
Humanitarian organizations and several governments have pressed Libyan authorities to curb abuses and close detention centers. At a U.N. meeting in Geneva in November, Britain, Spain, Norway and Sierra Leone urged Libya to shutter such facilities, where rights groups say migrants and refugees have been tortured, abused and sometimes killed.
The IOM did not immediately release nationalities of those on board the capsized boat beyond the two Nigerian survivors. Search-and-rescue operations in Libyan waters are routinely complicated by rough seas, limited capacity and jurisdictional disputes, factors that can contribute to “invisible” shipwrecks that leave no timely trace and few survivors.
The agency has repeatedly called for expanded legal pathways, coordinated regional search-and-rescue, and better protection for people on the move to reduce reliance on smugglers and the deadly risk of crossing the Mediterranean in fragile, overcrowded boats.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
