The captain of a rescue ship has described the moment his crew used axes and hammers to rescue migrants trapped in the cargo hold of a sinking wooden ship off the coast of Italy.
Ingo Veert, the captain of a RESQSHIP rescue ship, told the BBC’s Today program that his crew initially rescued 50 migrants trapped on the deck of the distressed ship near Lampedusa, before breaching the ship and rescuing two trapped on the ship’s deck. The people below decks.
He said 10 other men were found dead below the ship’s deck.
Rescuers said 64 people were still missing at sea after another boat sank near Italy’s Calabria region.
The second shipwreck is located about 125 miles off the coast of Italy. The country’s coast guard said one of the 12 survivors died after disembarking.
The survivors of the shipwreck off Lampedusa were handed over to the Italian coast guard and brought ashore on Monday morning, while the dead were towed to the island, RESQSHIP reported.
The U.N. agency said the ships were carrying migrants from Libya and Türkiye. They each paid about $3,500 (£2,759) for the voyage, the ANSA news agency reported.
Wilt, the captain of the Nadir rescue ship, said that at about 1:30 a.m. local time, the first report of “a completely overloaded migrant ship” came on the radio.
He said that when the rescue boat arrived at the vessel at around 03:00, it was “almost sinking, water was coming in and people were totally nervous”.
The captain said his crew provided life jackets to survivors and used axes and hammers to help rescue two people from the sinking ship. Rescuers found a survivor “barely breathing” and with a body temperature as high as 32 degrees Celsius.
“We opened the deck and dug a big hole to get him out because he was trapped in there with a bunch of other people. [dead] People… he’s still alive,” Mr Wirth told the BBC.
“They were all very young men between the ages of 18 and 25,” he added.
The U.N. refugee agency, the International Organization for Migration and Unicef said in a joint statement that the ship set off from Libya and was carrying migrants from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In another disaster near Calabria, aid agencies said many children were missing.
Shakilla Mohammadi of Doctors Without Borders said she had heard from survivors that 66 people were unaccounted for, including at least 26 children, some as young as a few months old.
“The entire family from Afghanistan is presumed dead. They set out from Turkey eight days ago and have been in water for three or four days. They told us they had no life jackets and some boats did not stop to help them,” she said in a statement Zhong said.
The Mediterranean is the deadliest migratory route known in the world.
According to United Nations data, more than 23,500 migrants have died or gone missing in the waters since 2014.
