More than 4650 migrants were saved on Tuesday off the Libyan coast and 28 bodies recovered, bringing the total number of people rescued in the past 48 hours to nearly 11000, Italy's coast guard said yesterday. More than 20 people were reported to have suffocated in the hold of an overloaded fishing boat, bringing the total death toll for Monday and Tuesday to 50.Italian officials said three women saved on Monday had given birth in the past 24 hours on a coastguard vessel that was taking about 1,000 refugees to Sicily. The women and their babies were reported to be in good health.The coastguard said the migrants on Tuesday were rescued from 33 boats, including 27 rubber dinghies and one wooden boat that was believed to have been carrying about 1000 people.A photographer working for Agence France Press, who was aboard a ship chartered by a Spanish NGO to help the rescue missions, was quoted as saying he had counted 22 bodies on that boat.He told media he thought other corpses were still in the hold.At its closest, Libya is about 290km from the Italian island of Lampedusa.The coastguard said new rescue operations were under way yesterday, but far fewer than on the previous two days."Obviously the good weather has played an important role in explaining the large number of recent arrivals," a coastguard spokesman said.The latest surge in new arrivals means at least 142,000 migrants have reached Italy since the start of the year.About 3,100 have died making the perilous trip.An estimated 154,000 went to Italy in 2015 and 2,892 died.The vast majority of refugees came from Africa, including Nigeria, Eritrea, Guinea, Gambia, Sudan, Ivory Coast and Somalia. ..