More than 200 African migrants are feared dead after a boat carrying about 500 people caught fire and capsized near the Sicilian island of Lampedusa.
On Thursday morning as African Voice went to press only 150 passengers had been pulled from the water alive, while the number of confirmed dead had reached 82. Rescue efforts were ongoing.
Trying to hold back tears, Mayor Giuisi Nicolini said pregnant women and children are amongst the dead and presumed dead.
“The survivors are in a state of shock. They have been in the water since the early hours of the morning,” Ms Nicolini told Sky News.
Ms Nicolini said the migrants – believed to be from Eritrea and Somalia – told her they lit a small fire on their boat around half a mile from the shore to attract the attention of coast guards after their vessel suffered engine failure. After the fire spread, the ensuing panic caused the boat to flip over, she said.
First on the scene were passengers on nearby pleasure boats who heard the screams, according to rescue workers. Shocked and grief-stricken survivors wrapped in thermal blankets were being treated on the scene and taken to a local hospital. Officials said the bodies were being taken to an airport hangar because of the large numbers. Prosecutors have already opened a multiple murder inquiry.
In a tweet, Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta called the incident “an immense tragedy”.
Lampedusa is an Italian island lying between Tunisia and Sicily and is a major entryway for asylum-seekers into the European Union, with thousands arriving every year. Numbers have increased in recent weeks, leading to a number of tragedies. On Monday (September 30), 13 Eritrean migrants drowned as they tried to swim ashore when their boat ran aground off Sicily near the city of Ragusa. In a similar incident near Catania in another part of Sicily in August, six young Egyptian men drowned trying to reach the shore.
Pope Francis visited Lampedusa in July on his first trip outside Rome as pontiff and called for an end to “indifference” to the plight of refugees. He said at a mass during his visit: “The culture of well-being makes us think about ourselves, renders us insensitive to the cries of others.”
