Horrific accounts have emerged of how 30 migrants were left to die, bolted by traffickers into the suffocating hull of an overcrowded fishing boat near Sicily.
"There were too many of us. They forced us onto the boat, though there was no space left. Those inside, with the hatch closed, they were killed," a young Syrian survivor was quoted as saying by the Corriere della Sera daily on Tuesday.
"When they tried to get out to escape the heat, the lack of oxygen and the fumes, the traffickers - fearing the boat would capsize - gave the order to keep them inside, bolting the hatch," the paper said.
Another unamed Syrian survivor described a similar account of dozens of bodies being trapped in the boat's hold by the traffickers.
"They were shouting, asking for help, begging to be let out of there, to be allowed to breath some fresh air," the man told Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
"They tried to clamber on top of one another to get out of the hole in which they had been crammed like animals for slaughter. But the boat started to move around too much; others on the upper level of the boat were scared and then they closed the hatch in their faces and sat down on top of it."
Sobbing migrants told police of their attempts to rescue their friends and relatives, and of the traffickers' refusal to open the hatch or turn back even as the tiny hold filled with engine fumes.
Two of the survivors were arrested on Tuesday on suspicion of people trafficking, Italian media reports said.
Rescuers at the port of Pozzallo struggled to pull the bodies free from the small blue fishing boat, in which the migrants - for the most part from Syria, Eritrea, Somalia and Cameroon - had set sail from the coast of North Africa for Italy.
"The hold, with dozens of bodies piled one on top of another like a mass grave, is the new Auschwitz of the Mediterranean," police officer Nico Ciavola said.
All the dead were men. Among the survivors were 52 children and three heavily pregnant women, the reports said.
The survivors were placed in a makeshift reception centre, where they are likely to stay while the investigation into the disaster is carried out.
Share
