Rome: Authorities reported that 58 passengers perished when their crammed wooden boat slammed into jagged reefs and disintegrated off the coast of southern Italy. According to Manuela Curra, a representative of the regional government, the preliminary death toll was 58. Eighty-one people survived, with 20 hospitalised including one person in intensive care, she said. Survivors reportedly indicated that dozens more could be missing.
The several passengers aboard the boat at the time of the reef collision in the ferociously choppy seas were also subject to varying estimations. Part of the debris washed up on a section of beach along the Ionian Sea coast of Calabria, where splintered fragments of vivid blue wood scattered the sand like matchsticks.
According to survivors mentioned in media reports from the village of Steccato di Cutro, the boat left Turkey five days earlier with more than 200 passengers on board. Italian PM Giorgia Meloni said some 200 migrants had been crowded into a 66-foot-long boat. Italy’s coast guard, which was coordinating the rescue, said about 120 migrants were believed to have been on board.
Earlier, the mayor of Cutro, Antonio Ceraso, told news agency that women and children were among the dead. He said the migrants’ wooden boat had “disintegrated” amid stormy sea conditions, with parts of the wreckage ruins strewn across some 300 metres of the coast. Italian news agency Adnkronos said the migrants caught up in the shipwreck came from Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, while ANSA said they came from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria.
Italian officials said that a rescue mission comprising a helicopter, police aircraft, state fireman squad vessels, coast guard vessels, and border police vessels was underway on Sunday. Fishermen from the area aided in the search for survivors. As they pulled a body ashore, two firefighter water rescuers battled strong winds and waves that were smashing several metres high onto the beach.