THE BODIES of 25 migrants were discovered by Italian coastguards yesterday as they examined a boat that had just been towed into the small island of Lampedusa. The coastguards found the bodies jammed into the engine room of the overcrowded little boat.
While it is believed all 25 died from asphyxiation, public prosecutors from Agrigento in Sicily have opened an inquiry into the exact circumstances of the deaths.
Italian media reports claim that some of the 271 survivors offered harrowing accounts of the deaths of the migrants who were reportedly all under 25 years of age, of sub-Saharan extraction. There was one woman in the group.
“They were screaming to be let out of the engine room but they were just shoved back in again. They were asking for help because they had no oxygen.
“One of them managed to get out but some men took a hold of him and threw him into the sea where he drowned,” an unnamed survivor told reporters.
The boat, which set off from Libya three days ago, had been spotted late on Sunday night by Italian coastguards, who subsequently accompanied it into the harbour of Lampedusa, the small island that is routinely described as “off the coast of Sicily” but which is in fact closer to North Africa than to Italy.
The boat, picked up some 35 nautical miles south of Lampedusa, then broke down some way short of the island, forcing the transfer of its human cargo on to the coastguard vessels. It was only when officials were inspecting the empty boat that they made their grim discovery.
Investigators will be looking for answers to a number of worrying questions.
Firstly, when one of the boat’s passengers rang ahead by mobile phone to the Lampedusa port authorities for help, he said nothing of the dead bodies on board.
Secondly, when the coastguards eventually boarded the boat, no one among the 271 survivors indicated knowing anything about the dead people in the hold.
Thirdly, media reports have said some of the bodies bore marks of injuries and bruising not consistent with boat travel.
Chief prosecutor Renato di Natale yesterday said the first priority of his investigation would be to carry out autopsies on the bodies to “discover precisely the cause of their deaths”.
This year Italy, and Lampedusa in particular, have struggled to cope with a boat-people invasion that has been exacerbated both by the widespread political unrest in the wake of North Africa’s “Arab spring” and more recently by the hostilities in Libya.
It is believed that the vast majority of those who arrived on the boat with the 25 dead are Libyan nationals. Earlier in the day, another boat with 53 Tunisians arrived safely in Lampedusa.
There are no precise figures on just how many migrants have drowned while attempting Mediterranean crossings on overcrowded, often less than seaworthy vessels, but police sources suspect that hundreds have lost their lives this year alone. Last April, more than 250 migrants died when a boat that had travelled from Libya sank.