After giving birth to a son who was born dead, a 24-year old Eritrean woman bled internally for three days in a Libya detention facility without being given any sort of help in the cell where she was kept with other migrants.
When the time came to leave on a boat towards Sicily, the traffickers ordered the prisoners to get onto the boat and take the dying woman with them, saying ''throw her in the sea and all of you can go die in the Mediterranean as well''. Instead of throwing her into the water, the other migrants watched over the woman's body for the entire journey, calling her 'our sister'. Her body was later taken onto a boat used by a rescue team, who the other migrants told the woman's story to. 'She will be in peace here' The 431 survivors arrived in the Augusta cargo port onboard a vessel of the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms. The Eritrean's corpse was taken to the Syracuse morgue. ''We couldn't' throw her into the sea. She will be in peace here,'' some of the migrants told the volunteers working with the NGO. A 44-day-old infant and her Somali mother - who was with her husband - and many unaccompanied minors were instead taken for medical tests to the Lentini hospital in Syracuse. The joint force tasked with working against clandestine migration under the Syracuse prosecutor's office has reportedly identified some of the traffickers.
Takes of torture in Libya
The stories gathered by Syracuse carabinieri and volunteers from the Red Cross and the SOS Mediterranee NGO - which conducted three rescue operations with the Aquarius ship between Wednesday and Thursday - speak of torture and horrible circumstances. A woman from Cameroon said that she had been in a Sabratha prison for five months with her baby, who had been born in the desert in Niger. ''Women died in the jails,'' she said. ''One died after giving birth. The umbilical cord was severed with thread and there is nothing there - no medicine,'' she added. ''We couldn't wash ourselves and the water wasn't drinkable. Trafficking of sub-Saharan Africans exists in Libya, where everyone is armed, even children.'' They imprison, torture and take the clothes off women, she said, and men and children are sodomized. ''They broke the fingers of a girl by closing them in the doors,'' some of the women rescued said, ''and the traffickers pushed us into the sea, saying 'go die in the Mediterranean'.''