“We are worried and saddened, we must not ignore the tragedies that occur in the Mediterranean”.
A month after the tragedy, 76 bodies have been repatriated and 7 are still waiting to be identified at the Crotone hospital. The latter, next week, will be moved and, if not yet identified, will be buried in the Cutro cemetery.
In the meantime, there are still relatives of the missing people who go to the PalaMilone every day to ask the police for updates. The survivors, on the other hand, managed to leave to join their loved ones in northern Europe: for them, an exception was made to the procedure of requesting asylum in the country of arrival to speed up family reunification.
All the survivors, as well as the families of the victims and the missing, immediately needed psychological support, INTERSOS intervened in the aftermath of the shipwreck with our psychologists and, together with the network of associations which deal with this emergency, we also put pressure to obtain DNA tests to identify the bodies and allow them a dignified burial.
“It wasn’t easy not to break down”. In a phone call, Valentina Castelli, an INTERSOS psychologist, confides to us the most devastating moment for her during the long days of work: listening to the audio of a 6-year-old girl, unfortunately, found lifeless, telling her uncle that she had arrived in Italy, happy to finally meet him since he had left Afghanistan as a young boy.
“The news of shipwrecks and the finding of bodies at sea is continuing and we are saddened and deeply concerned,” says Cesare Fermi, responsible for Europe for INTERSOS. “We cannot close our eyes to all the tragedies that are constantly happening in the Mediterranean.”