Divers searching for victims of last week’s migrant boat disaster off the Italian island of Lampedusa entered the hold of the sunken vessel for the first time yesterday to find dozens of corpses packed in so tightly they were still on their feet.
A team of about 50 divers from Italy’s military and emergency services took turns to pull 17 bodies from inside and around the wreck of the boat, which caught fire on Thursday and sank within sight of Lampedusa.
The discoveries took the number of bodies recovered to 211. With 155 survivors plucked from the water on Thursday that left more than 100 of the roughly 500 passengers, mostly Eritreans, still unaccounted for, many crammed into the hold of the boat which lies on its side at a depth of 47 metres.
"The divers are using their hands to pull out the bodies," said Massimiliano Pugliese, the head of a team of divers sent by Italy's fire service.
One diver, Salvo Vagliasindi, told the Italian news agency Adnkronos: “The image I cannot shake from my mind is of those bodies packed into the wreck, almost all with staring eyes and their arms raised, as if they were calling for help.”
Another diver, Antonio D'Amico, started to cry as he described pulling a child free from the boat on Sunday. "He was turned away from me. I delicately pulled him free from the hull and his face hit mine," he told La Repubblica. "It could have been my son."
D’Amico said the operation was being rushed to stop the current dragging the bodies out to sea.
“That mustn’t happen,” he said. “They have already suffered enough.”
Luca Cari, a fire service spokesman, said some of the divers were veterans of the search for bodies around the capsized Costa Concordia cruise ship in Tuscany. "I have seen everything, but the fact the migrants in the hold had absolutely no chance to escape is what makes this so shocking," he said.
Capt Giampaolo Trucco, a spokesman for divers from the Italian navy, said: “Going inside the boat is the toughest job, psychologically, since visibility is low and the numbers of bodies is extremely high.”
The Vatican's daily newspaper reported that each diver descending to the ship was carrying a rosary blessed by Pope Francis. – (Guardian service)