ROME Two women drowned, another person was in a serious condition and two were missing when they went overboard from a dinghy carrying some 60 illegal immigrants to Italy, coastguards said on Tuesday.
A spokesman for coastguard headquarters in Rome said five coastguard boats and a helicopter were trying to rescue the passengers from their boat off the coast of Giovinazzo, just north of the port of Bari on Italy's Adriatic coast.
He had no immediate details of the immigrants' nationality or where they had sailed from, but he said the two victims were "Asian-looking" and had drowned.
In a separate incident, coastguards rescued some 319 people from two ships off the southern Calabrian coast after the craft which had tried to smuggle them into the country got into difficulty and issued an SOS.
The spokesman said the immigrants had been ferried to shore in Reggio Ionica, on the toe of Italy, south of Catanzaro.
Unconfirmed media reports said the immigrants had left from Turkey five or six days ago and that five had been taken to hospital for treatment but were not in a serious condition.
The immigrants in Calabria were believed to be Kurds, Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Chinese.
Hundreds of illegal immigrants land on Italian shores every week after often dangerous voyages in search of a better life in the European Union.
Some 400 immigrants, mostly Kurds, arrived just over a week ago on a ship that had left the Turkish port of Izmir.
(Reuter)