Shipwreck off Italy: Stadium filled with coffins of migrants
ROME (AP) — Wailing and other expressions of grief echoed through a sports complex in southern Italy as public viewing began Wednesday of the closed coffins holding the bodies of dozens of migrants who died in a shipwreck.
Meanwhile, the search by air and sea to spot any of the many believed still to be missing continued for a fourth day. Italian state TV and the LaPresse news agency said a child’s body was the latest of three corpses to be recovered, raising the confirmed death toll to 67.
READ: Migrant boat breaks apart off Italy; 43 dead, 80 survivors
Emerging in the aftermath have been conflicting or not completely synchronised accounts by authorities of what was known about the vessel in the last hours of its voyage before the shipwreck.
The migrants’ wooden boat, crammed with passengers who paid smugglers for the voyage from Turkey, broke apart in rough water just off a beach in Calabria before dawn on Sunday.
Eighty people survived the shipwreck. According to survivor accounts, the boat had held 170 or more passengers when it set out from the Turkish port of Izmir a few days earlier.
READ: Italy coastguard combs beaches for bodies after shipwreck
READ: Italy: Migrants paid 8,000 euros each for ‘voyage of death’
The coffins — brown ones for adults and white ones for children — were arranged in neat rows on the sports facility’s wooden floor in the city of Crotone. Atop each coffin was a bouquet of flowers. Some people added stuffed animals, another a toy truck, on the coffins of children.
Fewer than half of the coffins bore a name — the others were identified by numbers indicating the order in which rescuers found the bodies, pending eventual official identification.
Among the coffins without a name was the smallest one. It held the remains of a child younger than a year, the Italian news agency ANSA said.
Survivors of Sunday’s wreck and relatives of the people who died crumpled over in grief as they sat down to caress their loved one’s coffin.
According to family accounts, some passengers had called family in Europe and excitedly reported that they could see the Italian mainland — about an hour before the boat smashed up against a reef or sandbank in the Ionian Sea.
When the relatives heard about the shipwreck, many drove from Germany, northern Italy and other European points down to Cutro, the beach town where many of the corpses washed up and some of the survivors came ashore.