The mistral blows strongly in the Strait of Sicily. And the conditions of the sea, agitated by the implacable wind, are prohibitive. Off the coast of Lampedusa there are two shipwrecks recorded in the last few hours. The number of missing is around thirty . After the landing on the island, late yesterday evening, of 57 migrants and two corpses (a woman and a child) fished out by Coast Guard patrol boats, the IOM mediators, having heard the survivors, managed to reconstruct that the boats sinking would be two.
On board the first there were – according to the testimonies of the castaways – 48 migrants, 45 of whom were saved. It had left Sfax, in Tunisia, and would have sunk two hours earlier than when the Coast Guard soldiers intercepted the people at sea about 23 miles southwest of Lampedusa. On the second boat, which set sail from the same city as the other, there were instead 42 sub-Saharans, 14 of whom were recovered. The investigators of the Mobile Squad of the Agrigento Police Headquarters today will try to hear again the survivors, 47 men and 10 women, all in shock, to try to reconstruct what happened.
During the night, after the 57 survivors and the two bodies had landed at the Favarolo pier, the bodies of the one-and-a-half-year-old child and the woman, both Ivorians, were transferred to the mortuary in the Cala Pisana cemetery. The sea conditions did not spare even a small boat with 20 migrants who crashed yesterday on the cliff of Ponente, a rocky ridge over one hundred meters high. The castaways were stranded on the rocks because – due to a storm – the Coast Guard patrol boats were unable to recover them.
(Unioneonline/vf)
