Category: Nation & World

ROME — Bodies washing ashore day after day. Phone calls from relatives going unanswered. Migrants’ tents abandoned overnight.

Migrants trying to reach Europe are vanishing in droves in what are known as “invisible shipwrecks” but governments responsible for search and rescue are withholding information about what they know.

The beginning of 2026 ranks as the deadliest start to any year for people trying to cross the Mediterranean — an unprecedented 682 confirmed missing as of March 16 — according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. But the real death toll is almost certainly much higher.

Human rights groups are increasingly struggling to verify tolls as Italy, Tunisia and Malta have quietly restricted information on migrant rescues and shipwrecks along the deadliest migration route in the world. The news barely makes headlines, in part because the lack of transparency prevents journalists from confirming reports.

“It’s a strategy of silence,” said Matteo Villa, a researcher focusing on migration and data at the Italian Institute for International Political Studies think tank.

The organization Refugees in Libya and other human rights groups have been sounding the alarm since late January, reporting more than 1,000 people missing after Cyclone Harry hit the region. But authorities have not confirmed, denied or corrected those reports.

In the weeks that followed the cyclone, more than 20 decomposing bodies washed ashore in Italy and Libya while other human remains were spotted floating in the middle of the sea.

For the families of missing migrants, not knowing their fate is excruciating.

“Europe should know that these people who got drowned in the sea have family members, have dreams, have passions,” Josephus Thomas, a migrant from Sierra Leone and community leader in Tunisia’s coastal town of El Amra, told AP.

Sparse information means fewer deaths recorded

Even the U.N.’s migration agency is increasingly unable to verify cases of migrants who die in what are known as “invisible shipwrecks” because of the growing lack of information.

Last year, at least 1,500 people were reported missing whose fates IOM could not confirm, said Julia Black, who leads the organization’s Missing Migrants Project. The issue persists in 2026.

“We started a new secondary data set of what we are calling unverifiable cases because it’s just become so many,” Black said. For this year, they already have more than 400 missing they could not verify.

Many humanitarian organizations that previously filled some of the information gaps are no longer able to do so because of the global wave of funding cuts and government-imposed restrictions across the region.

“We’ve seen the restriction of access for humanitarian actors, which is not right. And now we’re seeing even the restriction of information,” Black said.

The Associated Press repeatedly asked authorities in Tunisia, Italy and Malta why they aren’t sharing information related to migrant rescues at sea and what their policies are. Not one responded.

Countries quiet on reports of boats missing after cyclone

Over the years, authorities in the Mediterranean have gradually reduced information related to migrants. But their silence was even more pronounced in late January after Cyclone Harry unleashed heavy rainfall, winds of 100 kph (62 mph), and 9-meter-tall (30 feet) waves.

Hundreds of people had departed from Tunisia’s coastal region of Sfax and disappeared, according to information the group Refugees in Libya gathered from migrants in Tunisia and their relatives abroad.

The group acknowledged it was difficult to be precise “because there is no central system recording departures, losses, or recoveries,” but it warned that the death toll was likely even higher.

“We are looking at boats that never counted how many kids are inside,” Refugees in Libya founder David Yambio told AP.

The AP sent five email requests to the Italian coast guard seeking information on the boats reported missing and search efforts but received no response. An officer who answered the phone said the coast guard did not have “any further verified and confirmed information regarding the circumstances.” AP also filed a Freedom of Information request, which is pending.

The coast guard also declined to comment on an alert it issued on Jan. 24 asking vessels sailing between the Italian island of Lampedusa and Tunisia to be on the lookout for eight small boats in distress carrying some 380 people. The alert was made public by Italian journalist Sergio Scandura.

One survivor rescued from the boats

There is only one known survivor from the boats reported missing during Cyclone Harry. He was floating in the water when a merchant vessel rescued him on Jan. 22. The man told crew members he had been traveling with another 50 people, some of whose bodies could be seen in the water in video of the rescue. Thanks to his testimony, their deaths were included in IOM’s tally.

According to the captain, the survivor was evacuated to Malta. The Maltese Armed Forces did not respond to multiple requests about their involvement or reports that they recovered the man and the bodies.

The Tunisian Foreign Ministry and the Tunisian National Guard also have not responded to multiple requests for information by email and phone.

Frontex, a European Union agency that assists nations with border surveillance, told AP that it spotted eight boats carrying about 160 migrants between Jan. 14 and 24 when the cyclone hit. It said six boats were rescued by Italian authorities, but the fate of the other two remains unknown.

On Feb. 8, migrants prayed and cried during a memorial ceremony in the olive groves near Sfax, presuming their loved ones could not be alive after so many days without news.

“All of us here are in deep trauma, are in deep agony,” Dr. Ibrahim Fofana, a migrant in Tunisia whose relatives have been missing since late January, said in a video shared by Refugees in Libya. He pleaded for authorities to identify the bodies that washed ashore in Italy.

Tighter information follows migration crackdown

Until mid-2024, Tunisian authorities regularly shared the number of migrants they were intercepting at sea, eager to show their European partners compliance with a 2023 deal to curb migration in exchange for financial aid. But the deal was also followed by a brutal crackdown against migrants on land that resulted in thousands being detained or dumped in the desert.

Nongovernmental organizations such as the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, known by its French acronym FTDES, which used to compile and share reports on migrant interceptions, were also caught in the crackdown.

In June 2024, Tunisia’s Ministry of Interior stopped releasing any information on migrants, citing security reasons, said Romdhane Ben Amor, FTDES’ spokesperson. But in his opinion, the motives were political. The numbers were incompatible with the narrative that Tunisia was not Europe’s border guard, he said.

Italy’s erosion of information on migrant rescues is even older than Tunisia’s. The Italian coast guard used to provide detailed monthly data on migrants rescued. The monthly reports became quarterly before stopping completely in 2020, Villa said. In 2022, previous reports were also removed from the coast guard’s website.

This year, the Italian coast guard did not share any migration-related press releases despite nearly 5,000 migrants disembarking on Italian shores, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry statistics.

“It is very clearly a political strategy to repress as much information as possible from the public,” Villa said.

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria — At least 23 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in suspected suicide bombings Monday night that targeted Maiduguri city in northeastern Nigeria, police said Tuesday. It was one of the deadliest attacks in the conflict-battered city in recent history.

Residents and emergency services earlier told The Associated Press that three explosions were reported in crowded places in Maiduguri, the capital of Borno state, including in a major market and at the entrance of the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital.

“Regrettably, a total of 23 persons lost their lives, while 108 others sustained varying degrees of injuries,” Borno police spokesperson Nahum Kenneth Daso said in a statement that blamed the attacks on suspected suicide bombers.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attacks, but suspicion quickly fell on the Boko Haram jihadi group, which in 2009 launched an insurgency in northeastern Nigeria to enforce their radical interpretation of Shariah.

Boko Haram has since become stronger, with thousands of fighters and different factions, including the Islamic State West Africa Province, which is backed by the Islamic State group.

Maiduguri city has been at the heart of the deadly violence but has in recent years experienced relative peace even as the countryside is often battered by extremists.

The attack took place less than 24 hours after the Nigerian military repelled attacks by militants on the outskirts of Maiduguri, in what some residents say could have been planned as a distraction.

By Tuesday morning, there was heavy security deployment in the affected locations and along major roads in the city, but many public places remained closed amid heightened fear.

“Investigations are ongoing to further ascertain the circumstances surrounding the incidents and to bring perpetrators to justice,” the Borno police command said.

Explosions rocked crowded places almost simultaneously

The first explosion was recorded at about 7:30 p.m. at the entrance of the teaching hospital, while the second and third followed few minutes later at the popular Monday Market and nearby Post Office business hub, both located about 2.5 miles from the hospital.

Witnesses recounted the chaos that followed at the scenes and at hospitals as security forces and the emergency services quickly intervened.

“This attack has been one of the deadliest in Maiduguri in years,” said Mohammed Hassan, a member of a volunteer group assisting security forces in fighting extremists. “We’re in dire need of blood,” he said of the situation hours after the attack.

The extremists have intensified their attacks against Nigerian military bases in recent weeks, killing several senior officers and soldiers, and stripping the bases of stocks of weaponry and ammunition.

The multiple attacks could be seen as a major victory for the jihadis in a city seen as impregnable despite the jihadis often targeting troops and villages on the outskirts of the city.

Past attacks in the city have been limited to one-off incidents that occur once in a long while, including a suicide attack that killed five at a mosque on Christmas Eve last year.

“Maiduguri being attacked is like an insult for the security forces … and for the (jihadi) groups, it is symbolic because it shows nowhere is out of their reach,” said Malik Samuel, a Nigerian security researcher with Good Governance Africa.

The message appeared in English on Emanuel Fabian’s phone.

“You have 90 minutes left to update the lie,” said a WhatsApp message reviewed by The Washington Post. “If you do this — you solve in a minute the most serious problem you have caused yourself in life. And you won’t remember me anymore in a week.”

Five days earlier, Fabian, a 28-year-old war correspondent at the Times of Israel newspaper, had published a short blog post reporting that an Iranian missile had struck an open area outside a Jerusalem suburb, harming no one.

Until he began to receive messages that threatened his life and family, Fabian didn’t know his brief report had triggered a dispute over bets on the prediction market Polymarket on whether an Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10. For those with money down, millions of dollars were potentially riding on his blog post.

Fabian was spooked enough by the threats to at least entertain the idea of revising his published reporting, he told The Post in a phone interview Monday. That could score a win for Polymarket users who had bet against a missile strike occurring that day — and at least one had offered to send Fabian a share of the profits.

Instead, he stood by his post, reported the threats to the police and wrote an article for the Times of Israel chronicling the harrowing experience. Fabian said he decided to publicize the story in the hope that “anyone who’s ever thinking about threatening a journalist will maybe think twice.”

Fabian’s run-in with disgruntled bettors follows a string of recent controversies triggered by prediction markets, fast-growing online platforms that host markets where people can bet on the outcome of future events such as elections or the Academy Awards.

In January, an anonymous user on Polymarket, which bars U.S. users, won $400,000 betting on the ouster of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro just hours before U.S. forces took him into custody. In February, Fabian reported that an Israel Defense Forces reservist was indicted along with a civilian for using classified information to place bets on Polymarket.

This month, users of rival Kalshi, which is approved to serve U.S. bettors, complained after the site declined to pay out on bets that Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei would be ousted, citing a policy of not allowing bets on a person’s death.

Polymarket and Kalshi say they monitor their platforms for insider trading and improper activity, but U.S. lawmakers have raised concern about the harmful incentives prediction markets create.

“Polymarket condemns the harassment and threats directed at Emanuel Fabian, or anyone else for that matter,” a company spokesperson told The Post. “This behavior violates our terms of service and has no place on our platform or anywhere else. Prediction markets depend on the integrity of independent reporting. Attempts to pressure journalists to alter their reporting undermine that integrity and undermine the markets themselves.”

The company added in a post on X that it had “banned the accounts for all involved” and would pass on their information to authorities.

The bet that would turn into a nightmare for Fabian hinged on whether at least one Iranian missile would strike Israel on March 10.

As sirens sounded across Jerusalem and the West Bank that day, indicating ballistic missiles in flight from Iran, Fabian began contacting authorities to see whether anything had landed or been intercepted. Within minutes, he published a brief post noting that medics were responding to reports of an impact near Beit Shemesh, a city about 20 miles west of Jerusalem. Soon after, he posted on X a dashcam video provided by a witness that showed a fiery explosion in a forested area not far from a residential complex.

“One missile struck an open area just outside Beit Shemesh, first responders say and footage shows,” Fabian wrote, noting that no injuries were reported.

Fabian moved on with his day, but on Polymarket, controversy was brewing. At the end of March 10, about $200,000 was at stake, according to a Post analysis of Polymarket data from crypto analytics data platform Dune and the website Polymarket Analytics.

His blog post appeared to seal a win for users who had put money on at least one Iranian missile striking Israel that day. But in a group chat on the messaging platform Discord, a user pointed out that a daily report from the Israel Defense Forces did not mention any missile strikes on March 10. That user and others suggested the explosion may have been shrapnel from an intercepted missile.

Under the terms of the bet on Polymarket, intercepted missiles did not count as strikes. And the terms said that if confirmation of a strike could not be provided within 48 hours, those who bet “no” would be declared the winners.

Polymarket determines the “truth” used to resolve bets on its platform via a complex system of voting by users who have bought a particular cryptocurrency token. As those users debated who should win the bet over missile strikes on March 10 in the days following the blast, more Polymarket bettors piled in, wagering another $7 million, with some individuals standing to win more than $1 million if the market resolved to “yes.” And Fabian began to receive messages from strangers encouraging him to revisit his reporting.

At first the messages were polite. “I’d appreciate it if you could update your article, as in its current form it does not reflect reality,” one correspondent told Fabian, according to his Times of Israel article. “Alternatively, if you have information that it was indeed a full missile that was not intercepted, I would be glad to be corrected.”

Fabian said he didn’t know at the time why the person was so interested in what seemed to be a minor detail, given that the blast had not caused serious damage. His confusion grew as he began to receive similar messages from other strangers.

“I started getting all these replies on Twitter, or X, where people asked me, ‘Hey, why aren’t you updating this story from the 10th of March?’,” he recounted. “I was so confused. Then I looked at the profiles, and I realized they’re all Polymarket bettors. That’s when it kind of clicked.”

By Sunday morning one person’s messages to Fabian had grown menacing.

In messages written in Hebrew on WhatsApp, which Fabian quoted in his published reporting and also shared with The Post, a user who called themselves “Haim” said if Fabian caused him to lose his $900,000 bet, “we will invest no less than that to finish you.” Alternatively, the message said, Fabian could change the article, “end this with money in your pocket, and also earn back the life you had until now.”

When Fabian didn’t respond, Haim began sending messages counting down the minutes, and claimed that he knew exactly where Fabian lived and who his family members were. Eventually, Haim switched from Hebrew to English, telling Fabian he had “90 minutes to update the lie.”

Fabian told The Post that he considered conceding to Haim’s demands.

“I thought, ‘Do I just change it? Because it doesn’t really matter,’” he said. “But then I thought, ‘You know, if I do this now, they’re going to come back to me again and asked for other things to be changed.’ They would have probably never stopped doing that if they knew they could make money this way.”

Instead, Fabian filed a police report, he said, and began working with his editor at the Times of Israel to publish a first-person account of the attempted shakedown. He said he hopes that the publicity will deter bettors from threatening other journalists in the future. But Fabian said he worries he won’t be the last — and that other journalists might respond differently.

Asked whether it’s possible the bettors were right and the explosion was from the remains an intercepted missile, Fabian said he was confident it was a warhead, due to the size of the blast and verbal confirmation from the IDF. But he added that it’s not something he’d usually follow up on after a minor blast, given that it doesn’t matter to most people — unless they have money riding on the answer.

Asked late Monday if they had any more information on the March 10 blast, an IDF spokesperson said they did not have any on hand but would look into it.

As of Monday, Polymarket was still accepting bets on the March 10 missile strike, nearly a week after something struck the ground near Beit Shemesh. “No” bets were far cheaper than “yes” bets, because bettors appeared to judge that the odds heavily favored “yes.”

Latecomers to the market were effectively betting not on what hit the ground in Israel but on how the mostly-anonymous voters in Polymarket’s system will ultimately settle the dispute. One trader with the username “poorsob” would win $1.6 million if the market resolved to “yes.” BenzoateOstylezeneBicarbonate would win $1.3 million. But, if the bet ended up as a “no,” Sofia1 and AAAAGAAaA65 would win about $400,000 each.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut) and Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas) are expected to introduce draft legislation on Tuesday called the BETS OFF Act, for “Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions.” They were inspired in part by predictions market bets on Maduro’s ouster and the Iran strikes.

The bill “would put a stop to these corrupt wagers, crack down on prediction markets that flout the law with offshore platforms, and reject the idea that we should commodify every part of our lives,” Murphy’s office said in a statement.

Amanda Fischer, policy director at the financial advocacy group Better Markets, said the “chilling” threats against Fabian underscore the need for stronger oversight of prediction markets.

Fabian’s choice to go public rather than change his story “speaks to his integrity,” said Fischer, a former chief of staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission. But she added that pressure like he experienced could add to the risks faced by war reporters.

“The last thing they need now,” she said, “is folks with a gambling position on life or death harassing them and trying to coerce them to change their reporting so they can get a payout.”

Jeremy Merrill contributed to this report.