Steccato di Cutro, Italy, March 1 (AFP/APP):It was 4:30 on Sunday morning when Italian fisherman Vincenzo Luciano got a phone call from a friend — something bad had happened in the water.
When the 50-year-old arrived at the beach near his home in the southern region of Calabria, the sky was still black, but he could hear the screams.
“When I turned on the light of the telephone they were dead on the ground, there were children, above all children,” Luciano told AFP, saying he and his friend began pulling people from the water.
“Eventually when day broke, we kept seeing even more dead,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief.
At least 67 people drowned in Sunday’s shipwreck after a boat carrying about 180 people broke up just off the shore in violent weather.
The body of a five-year-old boy was the latest to be recovered on Wednesday.
Luciano described how emergency crews arrived soon after he and his friend, as desperate survivors struggling to find their relatives on the beach.
“There were screams, mothers who were snatching children out of our hands thinking they were their children, you know?” he said.
Luciano said he was no stranger to migrant landings on his patch of the Mediterranean coast, but there had never been a shipwreck with victims.
“This is the first time, I’ve never seen a dead person before. I’ve never had a dead person in my arms,” he said.
“That morning I even had a three-year-old child, still with open eyes. I thought he was alive, that I had managed to save him but he was dead.”
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