A Sicilian port city receiving the bodies of 49 migrants, as well as more than 300 fellow passengers rescued in the Mediterranean, has cancelled its annual fireworks show as it mourned the victims of yet another desperate voyage.

Marco Consoli, deputy mayor of Catania, said on Monday that the traditional event was being scrapped out of respect for the 49 dead, Associated Press reported. A white balloon for each of the victims will be released instead, local news reports said.

Italy’s navy found the migrants, who apparently died after inhaling fuel fumes, inside the hold of an overcrowded fishing boat. Italian coastguard officials said survivors include many of the victims’ widows. The burials will be in Catania’s cemetery.

Fleeing war, persecution and poverty, more than 2,300 migrants have died at sea so far this year, with the route between Libya, where the smugglers are based, and southern Italy, being the deadliest by far.

Usually, coffins are unloaded individually on to docks when rescue ships arrive with the bodies of migrants who died after falling overboard or being trapped in the hold of capsising vessels or from other lethal conditions.

This time, authorities devised a new method since so many bodies arrived at once aboard a Norwegian container ship, the Siem Pilot, which took on the dead and the living from an Italian navy rescue vessel on Saturday. A crane was being deployed to transfer a container holding the dead on to a truck for transport to a morgue.

The Siem Pilot offloaded 313 people from the fishing boat and was also carrying 103 migrants rescued by a German ship after setting off from Libya on an overcrowded rubber dinghy, Agence France-Presse reported.

Elsewhere in Italy’s south, a Croatian coastguard vessel, part of the European Triton rescue mission, brought to Reggio Calabria 354 survivors and one body found aboard a crowded fishing boat run by smugglers, Italy’s coastguard said. Rough seas complicated rescuers’ work.


With southern cities running out of shelters for asylum seekers, survivors will be sent north. About 103,000 rescued migrants have reached Italy so far this year.

Police in Macedonia said on Monday that a migrant walking along rail tracks on the northern border with Serbia had died after being hit by a freight train.

Macedonia is a major transit route for migrants from the Middle East, Asia and Africa heading from Greece to more prosperous EU countries. Almost 38,000 migrants have been registered passing through Macedonia in the last month.

The migrant died on Monday while being transported to a hospital in the capital, Skopje, becoming the 29th person to die on train tracks in nearly two years.

Police also said they detained three Syrians on Sunday near the southern border with Greece, when a crowd of migrants threw stones, bottles and shoes at police attempting to restore order at the Gevgelija railway station where hundreds attempt to board Serbia-bound trains.

Source: The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/aug/17/sicilian-city-cancels-fireworks-show-respect-dead-migrants-catania

God be with their families..

God be with their families and may their soul rest in peace