The coffins of the 65 victims of the sinking of a migrant boat which occurred on Sunday near the Italian coast were exposed on Tuesday in a gymnasium. Among them, five children resting in small white coffins.
The toll of this shipwreck off Crotone, in southern Italy, increased on Tuesday to 65 dead after the discovery of a new body, the prefecture said in the evening.
The bodies of 28 victims have so far been identified. Among them are 25 Afghans, one Pakistani, one Palestinian and one Syrian, she added.
According to the European border guard agency Frontex, which was the first to spot the boat on Saturday evening, some 200 people were crammed on board the boat which left Izmir in Turkey, while the Italian coast guard given the figure of 150 passengers.
Only 79 people, from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, Iran, the Palestinian Territories and Syria, survived the shipwreck which occurred at dawn on Sunday when the sea was dismounted.
The coffins of the victims, decorated with flowers, were installed at PalaMilone, the sports complex of Crotone, a city of nearly 60,000 inhabitants, where a prayer in their memory will be held on Wednesday.
They are lined up in three rows on the sports hall floor after being left open to allow relatives and friends to identify them. A woman who came to recognize a dead person cried out in distress, according to an AFP journalist.
The nephew of an Afghan survivor who lost his wife and three children aged 5, 8 and 12 came from Germany to take care of his uncle and the only surviving child, aged 14. He told journalists that he wanted to repatriate the bodies to Germany or Afghanistan.
In front of the sports hall, dozens of residents gathered on Tuesday by laying candles and flowers in tribute to the victims.
“We go to this beach in the summer. It will be a memory that will remain for all the inhabitants, to think that there were all these victims, especially these children and young people,” Daniela Brugnano, 45, told AFP. years.
For Lucia Sottile, a resident of Crotone, “as long as a millionaire business is behind these poor people, it will be an emergency that will never end.”
A total of 14 minors are among the victims counted at this stage, according to the latest figures given Tuesday by Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi during an intervention in the Senate.
It is one of the deadliest shipwrecks in the central Mediterranean, which tens of thousands of people try to cross every year at the risk of their lives to reach the European coasts.
As part of the investigation, three alleged smugglers, two Pakistanis and a Turk, were arrested, a police spokesman confirmed to AFP on Tuesday. According to the Italian agency AGI, they are suspected of having charged between 5,000 and 8,000 euros to each migrant they boarded.
The wooden boat was called “Summer Love” and left on February 23 from Izmir, Turkey, according to the account of survivors at the Red Cross. Several NGOs, including Médecins sans Frontières, dispatched teams to the scene to take care of the survivors, including children who had seen their loved ones drown.
The European Border Surveillance Agency, Frontex, said one of its patrol planes had spotted a boat “highly overloaded with passengers” heading for Italy, and alerted the Italian authorities.
“There were no signs of distress,” the agency said in a statement, adding that the plane, out of fuel, had to leave the area. She also indicated that Italy had deployed two patrol boats, forced to return to port due to the rough seas.
The Italian coast guard for their part assured that Frontex had in fact spotted the boat but with “only one person visible” on board.
According to the Italian Interior Ministry, nearly 14,000 migrants have landed in Italy since the start of the year, compared to around 5,200 during the same period last year and 4,200 in 2021.
28/02/2023 23:34:31 – Steccato (Italy) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP