Members of the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms recover the dead body of a migrant who left Libya trying to reach European soil aboard an overcrowded rubber boat in the Mediterranean Sea
Credit: AP Photo/Sergi Camara
His journey began in Guinea, on the west coast of Africa, as his mother packed her bags and set out in hope of a better life. It ended in frigid winter waters off Libya, when the rubber dinghy carrying the two of them sank beneath the waves.
Joseph was just six months old, one victim of a tragedy that has claimed the lives of tens of thousands of asylum seekers making the perilous crossing from North Africa to Europe.
Many of those deaths were anonymous and unrecorded by the outside world. But Joseph’s fate was recorded on a distressing video in which his mother screams for her baby as rescuers from an NGO desperately searched for him among the waves.
“I lose my baby,” the woman cries out. “Did you see my baby? Why me? Why my baby?” She writhes around the rescue launch in emotional agony, as rescuers in wetsuits and safety helmets pluck an older child from the sea.
The rescuers, from the NGOs Open Arms and Emergency, did manage to find Joseph floating in the water, but he was barely clinging onto life. They were unable to resuscitate him and he died a few hours later.
His body was flown by Italian police helicopter to the island of Lampedusa, along with his grieving mother, who was treated in hospital. The rubber dinghy, packed with more than 100 migrants, had set off from the Libyan port of Sabratha.
But it began deflating and taking on water, with survivors rescued by the Spanish NGO Open Arms and Emergency, an international medical NGO which often works in war zones.
The NGO had just finished distributing life vests and masks to the passengers to begin transferring them to safety when the flimsy boat split in half throwing them into cold waters
Credit: AP
“The dinghy I saw in front of my eyes was the most dilapidated I had ever seen,” said Luca, a nurse with Emergency and part of the rescue team.
“Suddenly, a tear in the fabric – the dinghy comes apart and 100 people hit the water. There’s panic everywhere. We start rescuing people, one by one.”
“There are two newborns – a three-month-old little girl, who will recover shortly afterwards, and him, Joseph. He almost looked like a doll, but he had white foam coming out of his mouth and nose. He was freezing to the touch.”
“I have never been in a warzone but this felt like one,” said the 30-year-old Italian medic.
“The days I have just endured were the most intense of my entire life. Here, in the middle of the sea, people are dying.”
A pregnant woman gets an ultrasound scan aboard a Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms rescue boat, after being in the Mediterranean sea. The Open Arms rescue ship had been searching for a dinghy in distress for hours before finally finding it Wednesday morning in international waters north of Libya
The rescuers recovered 113 people from the sunken dinghy, including seven women and four children. They also picked up five corpses. On Thursday, in separate incidents, nearly 100 migrants and refugees drowned in two boat sinkings.
One shipwreck off the Libyan port of Khoms claimed 74 lives while a second claimed 20 lives. From the second sinking, there were just three survivors, all of them women.
"Rescued by local fishermen, they were in shock and terrified; they saw loved ones disappear beneath the waves, dying in front of their eyes," said the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres.
Bodies were lined up on a Libyan beach, some of them still wearing life jackets. Among the dead was a toddler.
Corpses continued to wash up ashore. Traumatised survivors sat in shock on the sand while others huddled under blankets as aid workers distributed food.
The US embassy to the beleaguered government in Tripoli said the shipwrecks amounted to "another horrific migrant tragedy – another reminder of the need for a settlement to the Libya conflict now in order to focus on the prevention of tragedies like this."
The dead join the estimated 900 other migrants who have died in the Mediterranean this year, according to the International Organisation for Migration.
Survivors from another deadly shipwreck who were rescued and taken to the city of Khoms, a port city 120 kilometres (75 miles) west of the Libyan capital Tripoli
Credit: AFP
The Mediterranean was “a cemetery without headstones”, said Open Arms, which runs the rescue vessel of the same name.
Many of the survivors this week were from Horn of Africa countries such as Somalia and Eritrea, as well as sub-Saharan African nations such as Togo, Guinea, Ghana and Ivory Coast.
Tens of thousands of asylum seekers have tried to reach Europe from Libya since the country descended into chaos in the wake of the overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
The crossing from Libya to Italy and Malta had become “the most dangerous maritime route on earth,” the IOM said.
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