- author, George Wright & Lipika Pelham
- role, BBC News London
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The captain of an aid ship has described the moment his crew used axes and hammers to free migrants trapped in the cargo hold of a sinking wooden ship off the coast of Italy.
Rescue ship captain Ingo Fehrt told BBC’s Today programme that his crew first rescued 50 migrants trapped on the deck of the ship near the island of Lampedusa, before breaking through the boat to free two men who were trapped below deck.
Ten other men were found dead below decks on the boat, he said.
Aid workers said another 64 people were still missing at sea after another ship sank near the Italian region of Calabria.
The second ship was found about 125 miles off the Italian coast, with one of the 12 survivors having died after disembarking, according to the Italian coast guard.
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 being towed to the island, according to RESQSHIP.
The boat was carrying migrants who had left from Libya and Turkey, a UN agency said, and ANSA reported that the migrants had paid around $3,500 (£2,759) each for the voyage.
Weert, the captain of the Nadir rescue ship, said the first reports of a “completely overcrowded migrant boat” came over the radio at around 1:30 a.m. local time.
He said that by the time a rescue boat reached the ship at about 3 a.m. “it was flooded and virtually sunk and the crew were totally scared.”
The captain said crew members provided the survivors with life jackets and used axes and hammers to free two people from the sinking vessel. Rescuers found one survivor with a body temperature of 32 degrees and “barely breathing”.
“We opened up the deck, made a big hole and got him out because he was trapped with the others. [dead] “People were saying… he was still alive,” Weert told the BBC.
“They are all very young men, between 18 and 25 years old,” he added.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the International Organization for Migration (IOM) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) said in a joint statement that the boat had left Libya and was carrying migrants from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In a separate disaster near Calabria, aid agencies said many children were among the missing.
MSF’s Shakila Mohammadi said survivors told her 66 people were missing, including at least 26 children, some just a few months old.
“The entire family from Afghanistan is believed to have died. They left Turkey eight days ago and were in the sea for three to four days. They said they had no life jackets and no boats had stopped to rescue them,” she said in a statement.
The Mediterranean Sea is known as the most dangerous migration route in the world.
More than 23,500 migrants have died or gone missing in the area since 2014, according to UN data.
