It was 4:30 a.m. on Sunday when Vincenzo Luciano, a fisherman from Steccato di Cutro in southern Italy, received a call from a friend telling him that something had happened at sea.
When the 50-year-old arrived on the beach close to his home, it was still dark and he first heard screams.
"When I turned on the lamp on my mobile phone, there were dead people lying on the ground, there were children, especially children," Vincenzo Luciano told AFP on Wednesday. He and his friend then began pulling the bodies out of the water.
“As the day dawned, we discovered more and more dead,” he recalls, shaking his head.
At least 67 people drowned in the sinking near shore of the lifeboat, which was carrying around 180 migrants. The overloaded boat probably hit a sandbar.
The body of a five-year-old child was found again on Wednesday, three days after the tragedy.
Vincenzo Luciano also remembers the arrival of help shortly after him, when the survivors were desperately looking for their loved ones on the beach.
"There were screams, mothers snatching children from our hands to check if it was theirs," he says again.
Migrants have landed on this coast before, but there has never been a fatal shipwreck. "It's the first time, I've never seen a dead man. I've never had a dead man in my arms," he testifies.
"That morning, I took a three-year-old child in my arms, with his eyes still open. I thought he was alive, that I had managed to save him, but in fact he was dead".
01/03/2023 19:17:51 - Steccato di Cutro (Italy) (AFP) - © 2023 AFP
