The toll continues to grow after the sinking of a migrant boat crossing the Mediterranean. The Italian coast guards continued their research on Monday at sea and along the coast near Crotone in Calabria (South) the day after the tragedy. After the discovery of the bodies of new victims stranded on the coast, the death toll rose to 62 dead, the coast guard said Monday morning, but this figure is expected to climb further. The previous count reported 59 dead.
NGOs have taken care of children who saw their relatives drown when the overloaded boat, caught in a storm, broke on rocks at dawn on Sunday a few meters from the coast. “A 12-year-old Afghan boy has lost his entire family, nine people in all: his four brothers and sisters, his parents and other close relatives,” Sergio di Dato, head of the team of psychologists sent to the scene by the NGO Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) to help the survivors.
Helicopters to help with the search
Italian police and AFP footage showed wooden debris scattered about 100 meters along the beach. Firefighters from the nearby town of Cutro mobilized a speedboat on Monday to launch new searches, helped by helicopters flying over the area. In the village of Le Castella, where a 15th-century fortress dominates the coast, an AFP journalist witnessed coastguard operations recovering the body of a woman, apparently in her twenties.
The Italian NGO Save the Children said on Twitter that it had taken care of survivors from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia and Syria, including a dozen minors who were traveling with their families. “There are a lot of missing minors,” she added. According to accounts by survivors reported by the NGO, “during the night, near the coast, they heard a loud crash and then all fell into the water”. “Some said they saw their loved ones fall into the water and disappear, or die.”
Three smugglers arrested
The boat set off from Izmir in Turkey last week and three human smugglers have already been arrested, while police are searching for a fourth suspect, Italian media reported on Monday. This new tragedy made the front page of the Italian press. “The massacre of the innocents”, headlined the Turin daily La Stampa with a photo of the wreckage of the boat. “The boat breaks 100 meters from the shore: the massacre of migrants”, wrote on the front page of the newspaper Il Corriere della Sera.
Expressing her “deep pain”, the head of the far-right government, Giorgia Meloni, judged on Sunday “criminal to put a boat barely 20 meters into the sea with 200 people on board and a bad weather forecast”. Italy, a country of first entry where hundreds of thousands of migrants have arrived in recent years, criticizes its partners in the European Union for a lack of solidarity in the distribution of the latter, even if a large number of them subsequently leave the peninsula for other countries.
14,000 migrants since the beginning of the year
Italy’s geographical location makes it a destination of choice for asylum seekers crossing from North Africa to Europe. According to the 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.
NGOs recover at sea only a small percentage of shipwrecked migrants wishing to arrive in Europe, most being rescued by Coast Guard or Navy vessels. However, the government accuses these NGOs of stimulating the arrival of migrants through their action and encouraging traffickers.