Shipwreck off Italy: stadium filled with coffins of migrants

The coffins of dozens of migrants who died in a shipwreck off Italy's southern coast have been laid out in rows inside a sports complex for public viewing

The wailing of survivors and other family members of dozens of migrants who died in a shipwreck off Italy’s southern coast resounded through a sports complex Wednesday as public viewing of rows of closed coffins began.

Meanwhile, the search by air and sea to spot any of the many believed still to be missing continued for a fourth day. Italian state TV and the LaPresse news agency said a child’s body was the latest of three corpses to be recovered, raising the confirmed death toll to 67.

The migrants' wooden boat, crammed with passengers who paid human traffickers for the voyage from Turkey, broke apart in rough water just off a beach in Calabria before dawn on Sunday.

Eighty people survived the shipwreck. According to survivor accounts, the boat had held 170 or more passengers when it set out from the Turkish port of Izmir a few days earlier.

The coffins — brown ones for adults and white ones for children — were arranged in neat rows on the sports facility's wooden floor in the city of Crotone. Atop each coffin was a bouquet of flowers. Some people added toys on the coffins of children.

According to family accounts, some passengers had called loved ones in Europe and excitedly reported that they could see the Italian mainland — about an hour before the boat smashed up against a reef or sandbank in the Ionian Sea.

When the relatives heard about the shipwreck, many drove from Germany, northern Italy and other European points down to Cutro, the beach town where many of the corpses washed up and some of the survivors came ashore.

While many traffickers launch boats filled with migrants from the shores of Libya and Tunisia across the central Mediterranean toward southern Italy or Italian islands, others use a route beginning in Turkey that crosses the eastern Mediterranean and aims to reach either Calabria in the “toe” of the peninsula, Puglia, the “heel” of the mainland, or eastern Sicily.

Viewing the coffins along with victims' families were the mayors of nearby Italian towns, the local bishop and imam, and townspeople.