26 Nigerian women found dead in Spanish warship

Italian prosecutors said it have commenced investigations into the deaths of 26 Nigerian women, most of them teenagers, whose bodies were recovered at sea.

According to the report by BBC on Monday, the victims, who are mostly aged 14-18, are believed to have been sexually abused and murdered as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean.

Following several rescues, their bodies were discovered in a Spanish warship, Cantabria, also carrying 375 migrants and 23 of the dead women had been on a rubber boat with 64 other people.

Italian media reported that the women’s bodies were being kept in a refrigerated section of the warship and most of the 375 survivors brought to Salerno were sub-Saharan Africans from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, The Gambia and Sudan.

Among the 375 survivors, 90 were women, eight of them pregnant, 52 children along with some Libyan men and women on board.

According to report by the Italian aid group L’Abbraccio, 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 and many migrants have reported violence, including torture and sexual abuse, by the gangs.

Five migrants are being questioned in the southern port of Salerno.

Since the beginning of the year until 1 November, 150,982 migrants arrived in southern Europe by boat from North Africa, report the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

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.