The crew of the migrant rescue ship Ocean Viking on Tuesday (November 26) brought 48 migrants to safety from an overcrowded rubber dinghy in Libya's search and rescue zone. Forty-four of them were reportedly minors.

That's according to SOS Méditerranée, the aid group that operates the vessel. The dinghy was made up of "90 percent unaccompanied minors", the Marseille-based NGO said. 

An airplane of the Western defense alliance NATO had alerted the Ocean Viking crew to the situation of the boat with a radio call, SOS Méditerranée said further.

Most rescuees hailed from The Gambia and Guinea-Bissau in northwestern Africa, according to the news agency AFP citing SOS Méditerranée.

Toward the end of the rescue mission, a Libyan coast guard vessel approached the rescue scene "at full speed" and conducted "dangerous maneuvers".

"Despite the unnecessary danger, the SOS Méditerranée teams managed to bring all the survivors safely on board the Ocean Viking," the NGO said.

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'This practice increases the suffering'

According to SOS Méditerranée, Italian authorities assigned the Ocean Viking the northeastern Italian city of Ravenna as the port to disembark the rescued migrants. The NGO on Tuesday said the port was almost 1,600 kilometers or a four-day sail away.

At the time of publication on Thursday afternoon, the Ocean Viking was about halfway there and is expected to arrive in Ravenna on Friday.

"This practice... empties the Mediterranean of search and rescue resources and increases the suffering of rescued people," SOS Mediterranee said on X.

Earlier this month, SOS Méditerranée said the Ocean Viking needed four nights to reach the northwestern Italian port of Genoa, where it disembarked 185 people it had rescued.

According to the Missing Migrants Project, almost 2,000 migrants have died or gone missing so far this year in the Mediterranean Sea (as of November 25), the vast majority of them in the Central Mediterranean. The real number is likely a lot higher.

Here's an incomplete list of recent shipwrecks and other deadly disasters involving migrants in the Central Med:

• In late October, a boat carrying 13 migrants, reportedly from Egypt and Syria, capsized off Libya, leaving all but one passenger dead.
• Also in late October, more than a dozen bodies washed ashore in Tunisia. The discovery came on the heels of five dead women and a dead toddler being found in September off Monastir, in central Tunisia, followed by the discovery of thirteen more bodies days later.
• In mid-October, at least one person died and two initially remained missing after a migrant boat with 100 passengers that had set off from Libya sank near the Greek island of Crete.
• In September, a shipwreck off the Libyan coast left one dead and 22 missing, Libyan authorities said.
• In the month of June, an average of three migrants died or went missing per day in the Central Mediterranean, according to the UN's refugee agency.

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with AFP