ROME (AP) – The Italian navy has raised from the seafloor the migrant ship that sank off Sicily last year with an estimated 700-800 people aboard in one of the worst known tragedies of the Mediterranean migrant crisis.
The navy said it had had successfully recovered the boat from a depth of 370 meters (1,214 feet) using a complicated pulley system fixed to a support frame that attached onto the shipwreck. Now resurfaced, the wreck is being kept in a refrigerated transport module for the trip back to port in Sicily, where forensic experts will begin trying to identify the dead.
A press conference to explain details of the operation is scheduled for Thursday, the navy said.
The April 18, 2015 wreck remains one of the deadliest on record, though the real number of drownings will never be known. On that night, the boat carrying between 700 and 800 migrants, most of them African, capsized as a civilian freighter approached.
Most passengers were locked below decks; only 28 survived.