Sex trafficking may be behind deaths at sea

ROME — The bodies of 26 female teenagers from Nigeria have been retrieved from the Mediterranean Sea and taken to Italy, where officials said on Tuesday they were investigating how the women died.

“It is a tragedy for mankind,” said Salvatore Malfi, the prefect in the port city of Salerno, where the bodies arrived along with 400 migrants who were rescued in the central Mediterranean in recent days.

“I think prosecutors will start working soonest to evaluate whether it could be homicide,” Malfi said in televised remarks, adding that autopsy results for the women could be released publicly in weeks.

The females were estimated to be between the ages of 14 and 18, said Marco Rotunno, the communications officer for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Italy. Their bodies were found floating by the Spanish navy on Friday, and survivors on nearby rubber dinghies that had partly capsized told authorities that the females were Nigerian and had departed from Libya.

Since the corpses arrived in Salerno on Sunday, no one has stepped forward to claim them as family members, Rotunno said. He said 400 migrants also landed that day. “So there was not a chance to speak with all of them, but probably they were not relatives of these girls,” Rotunno said.

When such groups of female teenagers are alone, the probability is high that they are victims of sex-trafficking rings, he said.

“For Nigerian girls, it is pretty standard, the issue of being trafficked,” he said.

Federico Soda, the director of the IOM Coordination Office for the Mediterranean, said it estimates that 80 percent of Nigerian girls arriving in Italy by sea might be victims of trafficking.

The teenagers were in dinghies that left Warshefana, an area outside Tripoli, Libya, late last week and capsized in bad weather, Rotunno said, citing accounts provided by the survivors.

“People at sea were trying to swim; most of them don’t know how to swim,” he said. “They have never done it.”

The latest deaths bring the total in the Mediterranean in 2017 to 2,925, compared with 4,305 during the same period of 2016.