Italy funeral for 26 young Nigerian shipwreck victims
SALERNO, Italy: The coffins of 26 young Nigerians lie in state in the winter sunshine in a cemetery in southern Italy, where a bishop and imam lead prayers for the allfemale victims.
The Mediterranean claimed at least 60 other lives in the fateful accident off Libya 15 days ago, but their bodies sank.
Most of the new graves in Salerno, south of Naples, will be marked by number only: the autopsies showed these were girls and women aged between 13 and 20 years-old, but only two of them have been identified so far.
Marian Shaka and Osato Osaro were both 20.
Shaka was Christian. Her husband identified her body.
Osaro was Muslim and it was up to her brother to carry out the same task.
The men, both survivors, stand a little apart from the other mourners.
Osato’s brother, 18, left home with his sister at the start of the year and spent six nightmarish months in crisis-hit Libya, “where you get shot for nothing”.
The pair then attempted the doomed crossing to Europe.
“My sister was so good, my mother was very proud of her”.
Beside him, Marian’s husband, a bright pink cap on his head, remains silent. The ceremony is short. Young people step forward to place roses on the coffins, fighting to stop them flying away in the wind.
Salerno Archbishop Luigi Moretti and Imam Abderrhmane Es Sbaa take the floor to pray.
“Young people who die at sea for nothing but a piece of bread. It’s not worth it,” says Samba Ba, a 48-year-old Senegalese worker who has been living in Italy for 15 years.
Nearly 3,000 men, women and children have died attempting the perilous crossing since the beginning of the year.
Post-mortem examinations show almost all the girls and women died of asphyxiation in the water when the inflatable dinghy they were travelling on sank. Two of the dead were pregnant. According to the United Nations, 80 per cent of young Nigerian women arriving in Italy are already in the clutches of prostitution networks, or quickly fall under their control.
It wasn’t clear whether that was the case here. There were no state representatives at the ceremony.
Italy’s Interior Minister Marco Minniti has been accused by human rights campaigners and the United Nations of an ‘inhumane’ deal with Libya to block migrants from leaving. — AFP