Italian navy raises sunk migrant boat
Print Edition
THE Italian navy said yesterday it has recovered the migrant ship that sank off Sicily last year with an estimated 700-800 people aboard in one of the worst known tragedies of the Mediterranean migrant crisis.
The navy said it had raised the boat from a depth of 370 meters. The wreck is being kept in a refrigerated transport structure for the trip to port in Sicily, where forensic experts will begin trying to identify the victims.
The April 18, 2015 wreck remains one of the deadliest on record, though the real number of drownings will never be known. On that night, the boat carrying between 700 and 800 migrants, most of them African, capsized as a civilian freighter approached. Most passengers were locked below decks; only 28 survived.
The sinking sparked renewed outrage and soul-searching in European capitals, which agreed to send in EU naval reinforcements to cast a wider safety net to try to rescue the waves of migrants leaving Libya on smugglers’ boats.
While tens of thousands have been rescued, thousands of others have drowned: During one particularly deadly three-day period last month, an estimated 700 migrants died, including those aboard a huge, overcrowded fishing ship that capsized as rescuers filmed the horror.
The navy launched the complicated recovery operation this spring; navy divers over the previous months had already recovered some 169 bodies found near the wreckage, located some 130km off Libya’s coast.
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