Mediterranean Shipwrecks Update
The UN refugee agency claimed that there are over 700 migrants drown in three Mediterranean Sea shipwrecks south Italy and most of them are children. Survivors giving their testimonies that there are dozens of small children seen when the incident happened.
Few survivors were brought to safety in the Italian ports of Pozzallo and Taranto as said by UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR). Carlotta Sami, UNHCR’s spokeswoman said, ”We’ll never know the exact number, we’ll never know their identities.”
With more or less 100 people still missing after a boat sank on Wednesday, 45 bodies were recovered from a wreck that happened on Friday. The agency feared up to 700 people had drowned in total just for this week.
Save the Children’s Sicily spokeswoman, Giovanna Di Benedetto, told AFP that there are around 1, 100 people who survived the incident and had set out from Libya on Wednesday in 2 fishing boats before this sad incident happened.
”The first boat, carrying some 500 people, was reportedly towing the second, which was carrying another 500. But the second boat began to sink. Some people tried to swim to the first boat, others held onto the rope linking the vessels.” She said in a report.
Survivors said during an investigation that the first boat’s Sudanese captain cut the rope, which decapitated a woman. The other boat quickly sank. On his arrival at the port, the Sudanese captain was arrested along with the three other suspected people.
”We tried everything to stop the water, to bail it out of the boat,” a Nigerian survivor told cultural mediators.
”We used our hands, plastic gl(–foul word(s) removed–). For two hours we fought against the water but it was useless. It began to flood the boat, and those below deck had no chance. Woman, men, children, many children, were trapped, and drowned,” she added.
”There were bodies everywhere,” told 13-year-old Kidane from Eritrea, a survivor.
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