ROME -- About 3,000 migrants were picked up Tuesday from the central Mediterranean, the Italian coast guard said, raising the rescue tally over the previous 48 hours to about 10,000 people.
There were 30 interventions carried out Tuesday by Italian coast guard and navy vessels; the European Union's anti-migrant smuggling mission; and the bloc's border agency, Frontex, the coast guard said.
A day earlier, the Italian coast guard coordinated 35 interventions, intercepting 44 dinghies; eight small, wooden boats; one ship with 200 on board; and another carrying 704 people, said Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the International Organization for Migration. Monday's operations rescued about 6,900 people.
"Nearly 7,000 people in a day is really quite a lot. If it's not a record, then it's close to it," he said.
Di Giacomo said two bodies were recovered, but the causes of the deaths were not yet known. The bodies were to be taken to the southern port of Brindisi today, along with 720 survivors, the area mayor said, as quoted by the ANSA news agency.
Rescue operations were continuing Tuesday, the migration organization's spokesman added.
The Italian navy and coast guard and British, Irish and Norwegian vessels as well as a ship run by the Doctors Without Borders charity were involved in Monday's operations, the International Organization for Migration said in a statement.
Dignity I, a Doctors Without Borders ship, picked up "twins who were premature babies delivered at eight months and were 5 days old," medical team leader Antonia Zemp said in a separate statement from her organization.
They were moved along with their mother to a boat that could take them onshore to Italy because "one of the boys was not well. He was throwing up, had hypothermia and was nonreactive," Zemp said.
Before Monday's rescues, August had been a relatively quiet month for migrant arrivals by sea, with about 12,600 compared with 23,500 during August 2015, Organization for Migration data showed. "Abnormally windy" sea conditions may have kept some boats from leaving North Africa, Di Giacomo said.
Since border controls were tightened earlier this year along the so-called Balkan route connecting Turkey to Austria, Italy has replaced Greece as the main entry point for Europe-bound migrants from Africa, the Middle East and beyond.
The International Organization for Migration calculated that 163,000 people had arrived in Greece since the start of the year, compared with 234,000 in the same period of 2015. In Italy, there were 111,500 arrivals in the year to date, compared with 116,000 in the same period last year.
A Section on 08/31/2016