Migrant boat capsizes off Italy island

Italian coast guards plucked 48 refugees from the Mediterranean yesterday and spotted 20 bodies at sea after a boat laden with some 200 African migrants from Libya capsized during the night.
"We have rescued 48 people alive from the sea while around 20 bodies have been spotted by the crew of the helicopter," coast guard spokesman Vittorio Alessandro, based on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, told AFP.
Around 130 people who were on the boat are believed to be missing.
"We are still hoping. Our boats and helicopters have thrown all sorts of lifejackets and lifeboats to allow people to hold on," Alessandro said.
Women and children are among those missing, ANSA news agency reported, quoting humanitarian workers assisting the survivors.
Survivors were given primary aid and some were taken to hospital.
ANSA quoted local representatives of the International Organisation for Migration who spoke to survivors, saying a total of 300 people were on board.
Coast guards said in a statement that the boat was just 13 metres long and had departed two days ago from the town of Zuwarah in western Libya. The statement said the people on the boat were mostly Eritreans and Somalis.
`Hundreds of African refugees from Libya -- many of them migrant workers stranded after the start of an uprising against Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and the beginnings of a civil war -- have landed in Italy in recent days.
Mussie Zerai, an Eritrean Catholic priest based in the Vatican who has helped coordinate efforts to rescue some of the refugees in the past, criticised European authorities for failing to evacuate them.
"These deaths were avoidable if Europe had listened... to those who were asking for an emergency evacuation of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa trapped in Libyan cities before the bombing started," Zerai told AFP.
More than 20,000 migrants fleeing continuing unrest in Tunisia have also arrived on Lampedusa in recent weeks, sparking a humanitarian emergency.
Migrants and refugees often travel in rickety and overcrowded wooden fishing boats and there have already been smaller accidents at sea.
The tiny island of Lampedusa is closer to North African shores than to mainland Italy and has become a gateway for illegal immigration into Europe.