Italy: new drama of immigration with about 150 dead or missing
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ennahar
ROME - About 150 Somali refugees and Eritrean are dead or missing Wednesday and only fifty have been rescued after the sinking of their boat in the Mediterranean from Libya, said the Italian authorities.
- The International Organization for Migration (IOM), quoting refugees rescued, for its part said that "about 300 people" were on board, bringing the balance to about 250 dead or missing.
- In Strasbourg, MEPs observed a minute of silence Wednesday to the memory of victims of immigration. "
- "We have identified about twenty bodies and have rescued and pulled alive from the sea 48 people," said captain Alessandro Vittorio, a spokesman for the Coast Guard in Lampedusa.
- Three other migrants were rescued by an Italian fishing boat.
- The first survivors, including a pregnant woman, were taken late morning on the small Italian island of Lampedusa where some exhausted, in shock and hypothermia, have received medical care and hot drinks.
- The first testimony is poignant. A Somali boy, Karim, mimicking the punch of a boxer, told the ANSA news agency he was forced to defend two traveling companions who can not swim and who clung to him in the water.
- "The Italian boat came very slowly, its engines off, up to a meter of ours. We moved our boat broke and we fell into the sea," said another survivor, who says he lost his wife and three year old son in the tragedy.
- Ennaharonline: m; o;
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