ROME: Fifty-eight people died, including some children, when a wooden sailing boat carrying migrants crashed against rocks on the southern Italian coast early on Sunday, authorities said.
The shipwreck took place near Steccato di Cutro, a seaside resort on the eastern coast of Calabria, the region that forms the tip of Italy’s boot.
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.
The provisional death toll stood at 58, Manuela Curra, a provincial government official, told Reuters. Eighty-one people survived, with 20 hospitalized including one person in intensive care, she said.
The boat was carrying about 120 people and hit rocks “a few meters from the shore,” the coast guard said, adding that the search for other possible survivors was still on.
Earlier, the Mayor of Cutro, Antonio Ceraso, told the SkyTG24 news channel 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 meters of the coast.
His voice cracking up, Ceraso said he witnessed “a spectacle that you would never want to see in your life … a gruesome sight … that stays with you for all your life.”
Firefighters were searching the sea on jet skis, but conditions were harsh making the operation difficult, Calabria firefighters’ spokesman Danilo Maida told Reuters.
Initial reports from ANSA and other Italian news agencies, spoke of 27 bodies washed up on the beach and more found in the water.
According to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, 20,333 people have died or gone missing in the central Mediterranean since 2014.
