According to the Italian
police twelve African migrants had died after being thrown overboard by fellow
passengers in the latest high-seas tragedy in the Mediterranean, as another
forty-one boat migrants were feared drowned in a separate incident on Thursday.
Police in the Sicilian port
of Palermo said they had arrested 15 Muslim migrants suspected of attacking
Christian passengers after a religious row on a boat headed for Italy, which is
struggling to cope with a huge spike in illegal migrants arriving on its
shores.
The 12 victims were all
Nigerians and Ghanaians while the 15 suspects came from Senegal, Mali and Ivory
Coast. They were charged with “multiple aggravated murder motivated by
religious hate,” according to a police statement.
Distraught survivors, who
set off from Libya on Tuesday before being rescued by an Italian vessel on
Wednesday, told a “dreadful” story of “forcefully resisting attempts to drown
them, forming a veritable human chain in some cases,” police said.
Nigerian and Ghanaian
survivors told police a group of Muslim passengers on the boat, which was
carrying around 100 people, began threatening the Nigerians and Ghanaians after
they declared themselves to be Christians. “The threats then materialised and
12 people, all Nigerian and Ghanaian, are believed to have drowned in the
Mediterranean,” the police statement added
In another drama, 41
migrants were missing feared drowned on after their dinghy sank en-route to
Italy, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) said, mere days after
400 migrants are believed to have died in another shipwreck off the coast of
Libya.
The four survivors in
Thursday’s shipwreck, who came from Nigeria, Ghana and Niger, said their boat
sank after setting sail from Libya with 45 people on board.
Their vessel was spotted by
a plane, which alerted the Italian coastguard, but by the time a navy ship
arrived to help them only four passengers were found alive.
Africans need prayers
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