Dolapoo's Blog
Italian police on Thursday said 12 African migrants had died after being
thrown overboard by fellow passengers in the latest high-seas tragedy
in the Mediterranean, as another 41 boat migrants were feared drowned in
a separate incident.
Police in the Sicilian port of Palermo said they had arrested 15 Muslim migrants suspected of attacking Christian passengers after a religious row on a boat headed for Italy, which is struggling to cope with a huge spike in illegal migrants arriving on its shores,AFP reports.The 12 victims were all Nigerians and Ghanaians while the 15 suspects came from Senegal, Mali and Ivory Coast. They were charged with “multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate,” according to a police statement.
Distraught
survivors, who set off from Libya on Tuesday before being rescued by an
Italian vessel on Wednesday, told a “dreadful” story of “forcefully
resisting attempts to drown them, forming a veritable human chain in
some cases,” police said.
Nigerian and Ghanaian survivors
told police a group of Muslim passengers on the boat, which was carrying
around 100 people, began threatening the Nigerians and Ghanaians after
they declared themselves to be Christians. “The threats then
materialised and 12 people, all Nigerian and Ghanaian, are believed to
have drowned in the Mediterranean,” the police statement added
In
another drama, 41 migrants were missing feared drowned on after their
dinghy sank en route to Italy, theInternational Organization for
Migration (IOM) said, mere days after 400 migrants are believed to have
died in another shipwreck off the coast of Libya.
The four
survivors in Thursday’s shipwreck, who came from Nigeria, Ghana and
Niger, said their boat sank after setting sail from Libya with 45 people
on board.
Their vessel was spotted by a plane, which alerted the
Italian coastguard, but by the time a navy ship arrived to help them
only four passengers were found alive."
See photos of rescued immigrants;
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