At least 92 people died in an incident where a boat carrying some 500 illegal immigrants caught fire and capsized near an Italian island in what seems like a never ending flood of illegal immigrants who desperately want to move to the EU.
Emergency workers found 92 bodies, including those of two children and several women, after the deadly boat incident on Thursday, Italy’s news agency ANSA cited the local mayor of Lampedusa, Giusi Nicolini.
A total of 151 people have been rescued so far.
“The survivors are in a state of shock. They have been in the water since the early hours of the morning,” Nicolini told news channel SkyTG24.
Nicolini further said that the asylum-seekers made a small fire on their vessel near the shore to attract the attention of coast guards after their boat faced a technical failure.
When the blaze spread, it created panic on board which in turn caused the boat to turn over.
“We cannot keep on counting the dead. We have to mobilize, do something concrete to avoid these constant tragedies of despair,” the local archbishop, Francesco Montenegro, said.
The asylum-seekers said they were from Eritrea and Somalia. The vessel is believed to have left from Libyan shores.
Lampedusa is an Italian island that lies between Tunisia and Sicily and is a main entrance gate for illegal immigrants to the European Union where Italy shamelessly allows people from outside of the EU to cross into the EU illegally without having any sort of papers with them whatsoever. Only God knows how many criminals, rapists, fugitives and even spies came into EU territory without having their papers checked… and “thanks” to Italy for all those “benefits”.
The fatal accident is the latest in a string of drowning incidents involving illegal immigrants traveling on wobbly fishing boats or rubber dinghies in the Mediterranean.
On September 30, more than 10 Eritrean illegal immigrants died as they desperately tried to reach the shore when their boat went aground off Sicily near the city of Ragusa.
In August, six Egyptian men lost their lives in a similar incident near Catania in another part of Sicily.