'Dear God, how many can there be?' whispered the captain of the Libyan coastguard vessel to his deckhand. As the rescue ship drew closer its searchlight picked out the corpses floating around the wrecked fishing boat. Even for experienced mariners, the sight was unforgettable. Pregnant women from Somalia, Nigerian schoolchildren and young Gambian men, dozens of them, bloated and scattered across the sea. On the upturned hull were no more than ten survivors, all hysterical and weeping,...
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'Dear God, how many can there be?' whispered the captain of the Libyan coastguard vessel to his deckhand. As the rescue ship drew closer its searchlight picked out the corpses floating around the wrecked fishing boat. Even for experienced mariners, the sight was unforgettable. Pregnant women from Somalia, Nigerian schoolchildren and young Gambian men, dozens of them, bloated and scattered across the sea. On the upturned hull were no more than ten survivors, all hysterical and weeping, grasping one another for dear life.
By daybreak it emerged that three boats had gone down. The survivors from the Nazar would speak of a blood-red sandstorm at sea and of hundreds slipping from the packed decks into the roaring depths around them. How many were there on each ship, their interrogators enquired. 'Too many,' one survivor claimed. 'The boats were so low in the water we had to bail from the shore. At least a hundred crammed cheek to cheek on each vessel, dozens of screaming infants among our number.' Where were they from? 'Everywhere. Lagos. Accra. Addis Ababa. Nairobi. Yaounde. Banjul. Dakar.' Where were they heading? 'Lampedusa and then Milan, Paris, London. Who knows? To a better life.'
The sinking of three illegal vessels in a storm off Libya, and the deaths of perhaps 300 people - one of the worst maritime disasters in modern Mediterranean history - barely made the news. An estimated one in every eight migrants who try to travel across the ocean to Europe don't make it, their bodies carried out into the cold Atlantic. Those who perish are identified only by chance, their skeletons dredged from the sea by Italian and Spanish trawlers, or their bodies washed on to beaches used by holidaymakers.
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