Life Support Recovers Two Corpses from Central Mediterranean

On Friday 27 June at approximately 16:00, EMERGENCY’s Life Support, on its 32nd mission, completed the recovery of two lifeless bodies that were drifting in international waters within the Libyan Search and Rescue (SAR) zone.

The alarm had been raised on Thursday 26 June by Sea-Watch, after its Seabird aircraft spotted several bodies in international waters within the Libyan SAR zone, and the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome also opened a SAR case on the matter.

“We are at sea to save lives, it is really painful to have to recover corpses instead,” said Anabel Montes Mier, Head of EMERGENCY’s Life Support Mission. We don’t know what happened, but we can suppose that there was a shipwreck of a boat in distress of which there was no news, or that instead the case had been reported but remained unanswered for too many days, or even that there was an interception by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard and that some people jumped overboard so as not to be taken back to Libya“.

What we do know for sure, however, is that it is inhumane for Italy and Europe to outsource the management of migrant flows to third countries that systematically violate the human rights of people on the move,” continues Anabel Montes Mier, Life Support’s Head of Mission. As we wrote in our report ‘An Inhumane Border: Saving Lives in the Mediterranean Sea’, we call again for the protection of the right to life at sea and the strengthening of search and rescue capacity in the Central Mediterranean through the activation of a European SAR mission.”

Life Support completed the recovery of two of the six bodies which had been reported as early as Thursday 26 June, shortly after 4pm on Friday 27 June.

“From the deck of the ship, we spotted the first lifeless body at 14:30 Italian time thanks to the position shared by the Colibri 2 aircraft of ‘Pilotes Volontaires’ and recovered it at 14:54 – explains Jonathan Naní La Terra, Life Support’s Sar Team Leader. The second body was also indicated to us by Hummingbird 2, which was in the air and did several laps over the position to signal it to us; we located it at 15.42 and completed the recovery at 16:08. It is the first time that Life Support has had to recover bodies and it is terrible for everyone, but at least we can try to identify them and their families will be certain of their fate.”

Given the advanced state of decomposition, it was not immediately possible to determine the sex of the two bodies. “Given their condition,” adds Umberto Marzi, doctor on board Life Support, “we can assume that they have been in the water for no less than a week“.

After informing the competent authorities of the recovery, EMERGENCY’s Life Support was assigned Augusta as the port of disembarkation for the bodies, which took place on Sunday 29 June.