Six bodies were recovered off the Italian coast on September 8 and transported to Lampedusa. It is believed that the drowned individuals were aboard a boat that sank earlier last week in Libyan waters.
On September 4, the Italian coast guard rescued seven people, all Syrians, from a half-sunken boat southwest of Lampedusa. The survivors told rescuers that they had departed from Libya on September 1, and that 21 of the 28 people on board, including three children, had fallen into the sea due to bad weather.
“We left Sabratha, Libya, on September 1 in the afternoon,” one of the survivors said. “There were only Sudanese and Syrians on board. The boat capsized after a day at sea. Everyone fell into the water because the weather was bad and the sea was rough. We tried to save our companions, but there was nothing we could do,” the survivor said.
Rescuers believe the recovered bodies are some of the 21 missing from the shipwreck, based on the coordinates where they were found. Lampedusa’s mayor, Filippo Mannino, described the recovery of the bodies as “another tragedy” in the ongoing migration crisis.
Non-governmental organizations accuse Italian and Maltese authorities of deliberately ignoring distress calls from the boat and failing to intervene for a long time, even though the boat from Sabratha had been reported by Seabird 2, the humanitarian plane that patrols the central Mediterranean searching for boats in distress, and by AlarmPhone, the international volunteer network that receives distress calls from boats along the route.
Numerous emails were sent to Italian and Maltese authorities starting on September 4, but no rescue action was taken, Sea Watch reported. The boat was last seen by Sea Watch 26 nautical miles from Lampedusa.
Meret Wegler, Seabird’s coordinator, said in a statement: “From the sky, we could see the boat in a highly unstable condition. It’s terrible to think that the people on board could have been saved, but instead drowned due to a lack of rescue action.”
Sea-Watch claims it has “strong reasons” to believe that the boat in question is the one that sank 10 miles off Lampedusa two days after being reported to the authorities on September 4. The Italian authorities’ response “came too late,” the NGO said.
More than 2,500 migrants have died or gone missing attempting to cross the Mediterranean in 2023, and 1,116 since the start of 2024, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
The cover image was created with ChatGPT’s AI.