25 African migrants die on boat off Italy's Lampedusa

Aug 1, 2011, 13:16 GMT

Lampedusa, Italy - Twenty-five African migrants suffocated on a refugee boat off Lampedusa, the Italian island's port authority said Monday. The victims, all of them male, had been stuck below deck in the vessel's cramped engine room.

The ship had sent an emergency signal the previous evening and was aided by the Italian coast guard about 35 nautical miles (65 kilometres) off Lampedusa.

The victims apparently died a few hours after leaving port in Libya and already showed signs of decomposition, media reports said.

'I will never forget what I saw below deck there,' a member of the fire brigade said. The prosecutor's office in the province of Agrigento ordered an investigation into the deaths to clarify the cause of death and a possible criminal background.

According to first reports from survivors there was only a 50-centimetre-wide hatch between the deck and the engine room.

When the air down there became unbreathable due to engine fumes, the men tried to get out, but were prevented from doing so by other migrants because there was no space on the overcrowded deck.

Some 300 people had been on board the 15-metre-long vessel - 271 of them, among them 36 women and 21 children - were moved to Lampedusa by the coastguard from the barely seaworthy boat, Italian media reported. Most of the migrants hailed from sub-Saharan Africa.

In April, more than 250 migrants died in a shipwreck some 39 nautical miles off Lampedusa.

Italy, and mainly Lampedusa, which is only 130 kilometres off the Tunisian coast, has again become a main destination of refugees and migrants since the start of the revolutions in North Africa earlier this year.

Since January, 33,000 people have arrived on the island of just 20 square kilometres.

On the Italian mainland, hundreds of refugees blocked roads and a railway line in the southern city of Bari on Monday.

Dozens of police were injured in clashes with the stone-throwing protesters, who demanded that the authorities speed up dealing with their applications for refugee status. The protests caused interruptions in railway services.