ROME – Hopes faded on Thursday for some 150 African refugees fleeing Libya whose boat capsized in the middle of the Mediterranean in stormy weather, a day after 53 survivors were plucked from the sea.
“We are still searching for 150 people. The hope of finding other survivors is fading by the hour,” Interior Minister Roberto Maroni said in parliament. Italian and Maltese coast guard vessels and planes, as well as two commercial vessels, were taking part in the high-seas rescue operation. “The rescue operation is being made more difficult by the ongoing storm… We’ve not been collecting the bodies because of the rough sea,” said Vittorio Alessandro, a spokesman for the coast guard on the island of Lampedusa.
Alessandro said that 20 corpses had been spotted in the area on Wednesday, while helicopter pilots who flew over the scene of the accident said they had seen “dozens” of bodies near the boat including small children. The 13-metre (42-foot) boat got into trouble in the early hours of Wednesday amid three-metre high waves some 40 nautical miles (46 miles, 74 kilometres) south of Lampedusa in waters that are formally under Maltese jurisdiction.
“Our hope is of finding a survivor, maybe someone who held on to a piece of the wreckage,” said Pietro Carosia, head of the coast guard in Lampedusa, where more than 20,000 mostly Tunisian migrants have landed in recent weeks.
