Italy: hundreds unaccounted for in deadly migrant shipwreck
Hundreds are still unaccounted for and dozens have died after a ship carrying migrant African workers was wrecked off the coast of Italy.
At least 92 people have died after the boat, which was reported to be carrying 500 people, caught fire and sank of the Sicilian island of Lampedusa on Thursday.
Antonio Candela, the government’s health commissioner for Palermo, has been quoted by LaPresse news agency as saying 159 people have been rescued – leaving around 250 people still unaccounted for.
Rescued migrants were brought ashore by officials on Thursday, and recovered bodies were laid out along the seafront.
‘Immense tragedy’
“It’s an immense tragedy”, Lampedusa Mayor Giusi Nicolini said as she revealed that a three-year-old child and a pregnant woman had been found amongst the dead.
She said the ship had apparently caught fire after people on board fired flares to try and attract the attention of passing ships. It then capsized, she said, spilling passengers into the water.
Thousands of African migrants cross to Italy each year seeking a new life in the European Union, and Thursday’s tragedy is one of the deadliest incidents of its kind in recent times.
The migrants on board were from Eritrea, Ghana and Somalia, coastguards said.
Migrating thousands
Lampedusa is closer to Africa than to the Italian mainland, and hundreds of migrants reach its shores each day. There, they are processed in immigration centres, screened for asylum, and often sent back home.
According to the UN refugee agency, 8,400 migrants landed in Italy and Malta in the first six months of the year, almost double the 4,500 who arrived during the first half of 2012.
As a result of the Arab Spring in 2011, tens of thousands of migrants flooded to Italy. In recent week the number of migrants has spiked, the UN said, particularly with Syrian arrivals.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees has recorded 40 deaths in the first half of 2013, and a total of 500 for all of 2012, based on interviews with survivors.
Fortress Europe, an Italian observatory that tracks migrant deaths reported by the media, says about 6,450 people died in the Canal of Sicily between 1994 and 2012.