It was about 5.30am on Sunday when Vincenzo Luciano rushed to the beach in Steccato di Cutro in Italy’s southern Calabria region after receiving a call from a fellow fisher who described seeing a boat breaking up in the waves.
“It was still dark, but when I arrived I could see many bodies on the beach, those of children too,” Luciano said. “Using the light from my phone I tried to find others in the sea. Nothing like this has ever happened on this stretch of coast before, and I hope it’s a memory I’m able to forget quickly.”
Sixty-two people, including 12 children, are so far confirmed to have died after the wooden boat sank in rough seas off Steccato di Cutro, a little village home to about 450 people and a popular tourist destination in summer. The boat had left the Turkish port of İzmir four days before, carrying people from Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan, who were just metres away from the shore when the tragedy occurred.
On Saturday night the vessel was seen about 45 miles (74km) off the Italian coast by a plane operated by the EU’s border agency, Frontex, but patrol boats sent to intercept it were returned to port due to bad weather. Police said they then mobilised a squad to search the coastline.
Many of the bodies were found washed up on the beach, while others were recovered from the sea.
Remains of the 20-metre-long vessel were strewn along the coast on Monday, as were the belongings of its passengers, including shoes, rucksacks and a child’s pink rubber float.
Luciano was on the beach again early on Monday morning when he came across the body of another victim, believed to be a young man from Iraq. “I was driving up and down the beach in my Jeep when I saw him,” he said.
Antonella, who was walking along the beach with her friend Maria, said: “We’re all in shock. The beach is like a cemetery. Look at the sea – it’s beautiful, but deceptive.”
Eighty people survived, of whom 20 have been hospitalised, one in intensive care.
Two people, including a Turkish national, have been detained on suspicion of people smuggling. It is unclear how many were on the boat.
“Some survivors say there were 120 on board the boat; others say 200,” said Sergio Tedesco, commander of the local police force. “The numbers are difficult to establish, we just have to wait. Maybe when the sea is calmer it might return more bodies, even after a week.”
It is the deadliest migrant shipwreck to occur so close to the shore in Italy since 368 people lost their lives after the boat they were on sank off the island of Lampedusa in October 2013.
“I have been treating migrants for 30 years and have never seen anything like this,” said Orlando Amodeo, a doctor who tended to the survivors. “Yes, we have had boats getting into difficulty on this beach in the past, but everyone was saved. These people travelled 1,078km by sea only to die three metres from the shore – it’s a tragedy within a tragedy for people who were already unfortunate.”
The shipwreck has also reignited the debate on immigration in Europe and Italy, where the nationalist government of the prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who came to power in October, imposed tough measures against sea rescue charities – including fining them up to €50,000 (£44,000) if they flout a requirement to request where to harbour and sail to port immediately after undertaking a rescue instead of remaining at sea to help people from other boats in difficulty.
Geo Barents, a ship run by Doctors Without Borders, on Friday became the first vessel to be penalised under the new system after being hit with a €10,000 fine and a ban from operating for 20 days.
Meloni expressed “deep sorrow” for the lives cut short by people smugglers in the shipwreck while repeating her government’s commitment to “preventing departures and along with them the tragedies that unfold”. “It is inhumane to exchange the lives of men, women and children for the price of a ‘ticket’ paid by them on the false promise of a safe journey,” she said.
Italy is one of the main landing points for people trying to enter Europe, but the “central Mediterranean route” is considered one of the world’s most dangerous. According to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants project, 17,000 people have died or have gone missing in the central Mediterranean, and 26,085 across the entire Mediterranean, since 2014.
But for the past decade EU member states have failed to come up with a shared, effective plan to manage migrant arrivals, and there is no official search and rescue operation in the Mediterranean.
“I see no sense in saying ‘stop departures’, especially from a country like Turkey, which hosts the biggest refugee population in the world and is now dealing with an earthquake crisis,” said Christopher Hein, a professor of immigration law and policies at Luiss University in Rome. “I see even less sense in saying ‘we must stop people leaving their countries of origin’ – how can you prevent them from leaving Afghanistan or Syria? These are just empty words.”
Hein was also critical of comments by the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, who on Sunday said the EU “must redouble its efforts on a pact on migration and asylum and “plan of action” on the central Mediterranean.
“What has the EU’s pact on migration and asylum, which was presented by the commission in 2021, got to do with this tragedy?” said Hein. “In more than 500 pages of this pact, there is no word about a European effort on search and rescue at sea … I compared the declarations made by Italian and European leaders after this tragedy with those made after Lampedusa in 2013, and nothing has changed.”
Residents in Steccato di Cutro held a minute’s silence for the people who died in the shipwreck, but as rescuers continued their search amid bad weather on Monday afternoon, anger was growing over the failure of national and European political institutions to manage migration in a humane way. “We are only a hamlet of 450 people and are all so saddened – seeing children dying at sea is unacceptable,” said Gianluca. “They come here in search of the European mirage, and instead they find death.”
