5 migrants die trying to reach Europe

Two boats carrying would-be migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe sank Wednesday between Italy and Libya, leaving five people dead, including a child, Italian officials said. Eleven others were missing and presumed dead.

One of the boats sank some 40 miles south of Lampedusa, a tiny Italian island closer to north Africa than Sicily, coast guard officials in Palermo said.

An Italian Navy ship pulled 22 survivors from the water as well as the bodies of four migrants, including the child.

Earlier, another group of migrants that had left from north Africa was shipwrecked about 190 miles south of Lampedusa in an area assigned to Libyan authorities for search and rescue operations, coast guard headquarters in Rome said.

The Italian fishing boat Monastir took aboard 14 survivors and one body, and was heading to Lampedusa. The migrants said 11 more people had been aboard the sunken boat. The Monastir and other Italian fishing boats in the area searched for more survivors early Wednesday but found none, officials said.

In a third incident, a group of migrants traveling on a rickety boat hijacked a Tunisian fishing boat, and forced the crew to steer toward Lampedusa, according to the coast guard in Palermo, Sicily. A patrol ship was dispatched to intercept the boat, it said.

Thousands of migrants try to reach Italy's coasts every year, brought in by smugglers who make lucrative runs on often fragile and overcrowded boats.

If the migrants do not have the necessary documents and a job awaiting them in Italy, they are ordered to be deported, but authorities say many never leave and instead make their way up the peninsula to find work or family in continental Europe.

The crossings usually increase during the summer, due to good weather and calmer seas, but the voyage remains perilous, often deadly. In June, a French naval frigate found the bodies of 18 people believed to be migrants off the coast of Malta.