Shipwreck: victims taken to Spain instead of Italy

Following the hostile attitude of the Rome government, a Spanish aid group said on Wednesday that it would not take a survivor and two bodies it recovered from a migrant shipwreck to Italy.

Proactiva Open Arms, a non-governmental organisation (NGO), said in a statement that its Astral vessel had been authorised to dock in Catania, but would instead sail all the way back to Spain.

“This was in response to Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini accusing Proactiva of spreading “lies and insults,” and his ministry promising a “sort of counter-investigation” on the shipwreck, the NGO said.

On Tuesday, Proactiva found three migrants floating near a wrecked dinghy about 150 kilometres off Libya.

A woman was still alive while another woman and a young child, possibly her son, were dead.

The NGO accused the Libyan coastguard of abandoning the three at sea after they refused to be returned to Libya, along with more than 150 other rescued migrants.

A Libyan coastguard official, Tawfiq al-Sakir, disputed this saying “the boat had 158 people on board. All of them were rescued and no one was left behind.’’

Proactiva also accused Italy of offering to take in only the shipwreck survivor and not her dead companions, and said it wanted to shield her from aggressive questioning by Italian authorities.

The survivor is called Josefa and hails from Cameroon, according to Annalisa Camilli, a reporter for Italian magazine Internazionale who is aboard the Astral.

Josefa is suffering from serious hypothermia and according to her account, Libyan sea rescuers beat her and the other migrants who were on the dinghy, Camilli claimed.