The Italian government security agents have arrested an Egyptian and Libyan in connection with the death of 26 Nigerian women who recently died in the Sea of the Mediterranean.
The arrested men have been named as Al Mabrouc Wisam Harar, from Libya, and Egyptian Mohamed Ali Al Bouzid.
They are believed to have skippered one of the boats. They were identified by survivors who were among the 375 brought to Salerno by Cantabria.
The dead are believed to have been murdered while attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
The arrest, questioning and prosecution of the suspects coincides with the hurtful statement said to have been made by one of the surviving girls from Benin about Nigeria.
Dora Omoruyi, a 23-year old arts student from Benin, Edo state, however, lamented that there are no jobs in Nigeria, hence, her reasons for migrating. She was among the girls that luckily survived, according to photographs published by the NAN.
Two men, one of them an Egyptian and the other a Libyan, have been arrested and charged in Italy as investigators look into the deaths of 26 Nigerian women and girls, who are suspected to have been murdered while attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
The bodies of the women were brought to the southern Italian port of Salerno by the Spanish ship Cantabria on Sunday, and prosecutors opened an investigation over suspicions that the women, some as young as 14, may have been abused and killed.
The bodies were recovered by Cantabria, which works as part of the EU’s Sophia anti-trafficking operation, from two separate shipwrecks – 23 from one and three from the other. Fifty-three people are believed to be missing.
Some of the Nigerian women who survived the Mediterranean shipwreck. Photo credit: NAN
An autopsy on the bodies should be completed over the next week, report said.
Salerno prefect Salvatore Malfi told the Italian press that the women had been travelling alongside men and when the vessels sank, “unfortunately, the women suffered the worst of it.”
But in response to concerns that the women were being trafficked for the flesh trade, he added: “ Trafficking routes are different, with different dynamics used. Loading women on to a boat is too risky for the traffickers, as they could risk losing all of their ‘goods’ – as they like to call them – in one fell swoop.”
Marco Rotunno, an Italy spokesman for the UN refugee agency (UNHCR), said his colleagues were at the port in Salerno when the bodies were brought in.
“It was a very tough experience,” he said. “One lady from Nigeria lost all her three children.”
He added that 90% of migrant women arrive with bruises and other signs of violence.
“It’s very rare to find a woman who hasn’t been abused, only in exceptional cases, maybe when they are travelling with their husband. But also women travelling alone with their children have been abused.”
Most of the survivors were either Nigerian or from other sub-Saharan countries including Ghana, Sudan and Senegal.
Dora Omoruyi, one of the survivors who does not want to return to Nigeria. Photo credit: NAN
The survivors brought to Tripoli also included Nigerians and Senegalese.
“I wanted to reach Italy. I don’t know what to do now,” said Dora Omoruyi, a 23-year old arts student from Benin, Edo state, known as hub for human traffickers to smuggle women to Italy where they often end up as ‘flesh hawkers’.
“I see no future in Nigeria, there are no jobs,” she said, standing next to a group of weeping Nigerian survivors.
The survivors were among over 2,560 migrants saved over four days. People still continue to attempt the crossing despite a pact between Italy and Libya to stem the flow, which led to a drop in arrivals by almost 70% since the summer, according to figures released last week by Italy’s Interior Ministry.
The women who are mostly teenagers, aged 14-18 are suspected to have been murdered as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean.
Recently, Italian prosecutors said they were investigating the deaths of 26 Nigerian women – most of them teenagers – whose bodies were recovered at sea.
BBC reported that there were suspicions that they may have been sexually abused and murdered as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean.
Five migrants are being questioned in the southern port of Salerno.
A Spanish warship, Cantabria, docked there carrying 375 migrants and the dead women, following several rescues.
Twenty-three of the dead women had been on a rubber boat with 64 other people.
Italian media report that the women’s bodies are being kept in a refrigerated section of the warship. Most of them were aged 14-18.
Most of the 375 survivors brought to Salerno were sub-Saharan Africans, from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, The Gambia and Sudan, the daily La Repubblica reports.
Among them were 90 women – eight of them pregnant – and 52 children.
There were also some Libyan men and women on board.
People-smuggling gangs charge each migrant about $6,000 (£4,578) to get to Italy, $4,000 of which is for the trans-Saharan journey to Libya, according to the Italian aid group L’Abbraccio.
Many migrants have reported violence, including torture and sexual abuse, by the gangs.
In the year to 1 November, 150,982 migrants arrived in southern Europe by boat from North Africa, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) reports.
Of them, 111,552 (nearly 75%) came via the Central Mediterranean route to Italy. The number who died on that route was 2,639, the IOM says.
The others arrived in Greece, Cyprus or Spain. The total is less than half the 335,158 who arrived in the same period of 2016.
Last year the total for Greece was higher than that for Italy.