A girl from Sierra Leone was adrift in the Mediterranean for several days after a migrant boat from Tunisia sank. An aid organisation from Wendland rescued the child from drowning.
12 miles off the Italian island of Lampedusa, a German aid organisation said on Wednesday that it had rescued an 11-year-old girl from drowning who was drifting alone in the Mediterranean. The crew of the sailing ship ‘Trotamar III’ took the child on board in the early morning and then brought her to the island. Units of the Italian coastguard are currently searching for the missing persons.
According to the operator organisation Compass Collective, which is based in Germany’s Wendland region, the child was alone at sea for several days following the shipwreck of a migrant boat. According to the weather service, there were wind speeds of up to 23 knots and waves up to 3.5 metres high.
The girl was originally from Sierra Leone and was travelling with presumably more than 40 other people on a migrant boat that had set sail from the Tunisian city of Sfax. The boat had probably sunk due to a strong storm a few days ago. According to the crew, the child was the only survivor of the accident. She had no drinking water or food with her and was hypothermic but responsive and orientated, explains the Compass Collective.
The girl floated in the water for three days, supported only by two improvised life jackets consisting of air-filled tubes and a life jacket. The crew of the ship ‘Trotamar III’ became aware of her through screams they heard during the night. The girl later said that she had spent the first two days in the water with two boys who were clinging to tubes. However, these boys had disappeared during the storm.
After the rescue, the girl was taken to Lampedusa. She is traumatised and is being looked after by psychologists, explained the priest Roberto Rizzo from Lampedusa. ‘Seeing a child alone on the island, struggling between life and death, makes us wonder why safe journeys are not possible despite everything that has happened,’ he added.
The ‘Trotamar III’ supports civilian sea rescue operations in the central Mediterranean and was travelling south of Lampedusa at the time of the operation. At midnight that night, the crew had already found an unseaworthy wooden boat without an engine with 53 people, distributed life jackets and informed the Italian authorities.
In recent days, there have been at least three other shipwrecks on the route between the Tunisian coast and Lampedusa, which the Alarm Phone has learned about and reported to the relevant rescue centres in Tunisia, Malta and Italy. The accidents could be due to the weather conditions: ‘A real storm has hit along the route from Tunisia to Lampedusa in recent days,’ said Luca Casarini from the Italian rescue organisation Mediterranea on Wednesday.
The Ministry of the Interior in Rome counted around 64,000 people who reached Italy on boats this year. In the same period last year, there were more than twice as many at around 153,100. ‘We need safe passages for refugees and an open Europe that welcomes people and gives them easy access to the asylum system. Drowning in the Mediterranean is not an option,’ demanded Katja Tempel from Compass Collective.
Published in German in „nd“.
Image: The crew of the ‘Trotamar’ brought the child to Lampedusa after the rescue (Compass Collective).
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