Boat carrying 500 migrants disappears

A boat carrying about 500 migrants, including a new born baby and pregnant women, has disappeared in the central Mediterranean, 2 charities said on Friday.

Alarm Phone, a group that picks up calls from migrant vessels in distress, said it lost contact with the boat on Wednesday morning.

At the time, the boat was adrift, with no working engine, in high seas about 320 km (200 miles) north of the Libyan port of Benghazi and more than 400 km away from Malta or Italy’s southern island of Sicily.