300 uncounted dead: 2015 migrant shipwreck yields new clues
ROME — Before their lives ended in an underwater deathtrap, before they lined up 100 to a row on a Libyan beach to board a boat with no anchor, the young men from the parched villages of the Sahel had names.
Two forensic investigators, one crisscrossing Africa and another in a university laboratory in Italy, are on a quest against the odds to keep Italy’s promise to find those names. They are tracing the identities of the migrants killed when an overloaded fishing boat went down off the coast of Libya on April 18, 2015, in the Mediterranean’s deadliest shipwreck in living memory.
The pledge was made before Europe turned against migrants, and it just got even harder to keep. Nearing their very first formal identification, one of the investigators made a devastating discovery this month: The vessel carried not 800 people, as initially believed, but nearly 1,100.
Suddenly, there are hundreds more passengers to identify, adding to more than three years of painstaking work that had already pushed the boundaries of forensic science and tested the limits of both the Peruvian investigator with expertise in human rights violations and the Italian pathologist volunteering on the project.
The story of the fishing boat known as the peschereccio and its passengers reflects how migrants can simply vanish worldwide, sometimes without a trace. At a time when global migration is at an all-time high, The Associated Press has found in an exclusive tally that at least 62,284 migrants have died or disappeared worldwide since 2014. That’s more than double the only official attempt at a toll, by the U.N.’s International Organization for Migration .
But it is also a story of how difficult it is to document these dead and missing, especially at a time when there is no longer a political will to support survivors, let alone figure out how many migrants died and who they were. Back in 2015, thenPrime Minister Matteo Renzi committed Italy to giving names back to those who perished in the April 18 shipwreck. There was a “short period of sunlight,” when Italian agencies worked together to recover the bodies and start the process of identifying them, according to Cristina Cattaneo, the Italian forensic investigator.
“It was a magical moment,” she said.
Governments have since slashed funding; rescue ships have drastically cut back operations in the Mediterranean under pressure.
Many Italians question the need to identify the bodies when they already have “a tomb at the bottom of the sea,” said Roberto Di Bartolo, the engineer who led firefighters in the recovery operation.
“But if this boat had not been full of people from Africa and instead they came from the United States, Australia or Japan,” he said, “we would have done everything to get the bodies out and find their identity, to give names to those people, because they were people.”
The migrants on the peschereccio started their journeys in some 20 countries, from Bangladesh to the western tip of Mauritania, according to information from the two investigators, published accounts of survivors, Italian government documents, and families who fear their loved ones were among the passengers.
Many came from Africa’s Sahel region, where Senegal, Mali and Mauritania meet, walking northward or hitching rides in trucks.
Cheikh Fofana’s son called around that time to say he was leaving soon for Europe. Fofana warned him to wait for a big boat that might withstand the force of the sea.
Surviving a vast ocean is nothing like escaping a tree-lined river, he said.
“I told him not to take a makeshift boat, it’s very dangerous, it’s risky because the sea has no branches,” Fofana said.
His son, Tidiane responded he had waited too long to cross already, but promised, “I’ll try to take the big boat.”