“Still too many dead in a new shipwreck in the Mediterranean,” Chiara Cardoletti, the Italy representative of the UN refugee agency UNHCR, said on X.
An inflatable dinghy carrying 56 people left the Tunisian port of Sfax on Monday before getting into trouble, she said.
“After a few hours of sailing, the dinghy began to deflate and take on water. Six bodies recovered. 40 missing,” she wrote.
Italy’s coastguard said it pulled 10 people to safety and was scouring the area for survivors.
“Due to the particularly adverse weather and sea conditions, the search operations are being carried out with the support of various aircraft… which will take turns in overflying the area,” the coastguard said in a statement.
Those included aircraft belonging to Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, it said.
The dinghy was reportedly found partially deflated off the tiny rocky outcrop of Lampione, to the west of Lampedusa, which lies closer to North Africa than Europe.
The search and rescue centres in Malta and Tunisia have both been alerted as part of efforts to recover the missing, the coastguard said.
Those rescued six men and four women said there had been 56 people on board from the Ivory Coast, Mali, Guinea and Cameroon, a UNHCR spokesperson told AFP.
Survivors, who are receiving psychological support, said some of the missing had fallen overboard in rough seas, according to the AGI news agency.
After the migrants were rescued, a separate group of 40 migrants landed on Lampedusa after travelling from Sfax in metal boats, the ANSA news agency said.
There were five landings in Lampedusa on Tuesday with a total of 213 migrants, bringing the number of people at the island’s reception centre to 230, it said.
Around 8,743 migrants have arrived in Italy so far this year, slightly more than in the same period last year, according to Italy’s interior ministry.
Save the Children said that number includes “almost a thousand unaccompanied minors”.
Far-right Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has adopted a tough stance on migrants, vowing to stop arrivals, which are down sharply on 2023 figures.
The country is the first port of call for many people who make the perilous journey on small boats from North Africa to Europe.
According to the International Organization for Migration, 140 people have died or gone missing while attempting the central Mediterranean crossing so far this year.
Meloni’s flagship plan is to outsource migrant processing to Albania a non-EU country and speed up repatriations of failed asylum seekers.
But the scheme, closely watched by Europe, has run into several legal hurdles and the purpose-built centres in Albania currently stand empty.
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