300 uncounted dead: 2015 migrant shipwreck yields new clues
ROME — Before their lives ended in an underwater deathtrap, before they lined up 100 to a row on a Libyan beach to board a boat with no anchor, the young men from the parched villages of the Sahel had names.
Two forensic investigators, one crisscrossing Africa and another in a university laboratory in Italy, are on a quest against the odds to keep Italy’s promise to find those names. They are tracing the identities of the migrants killed when an overloaded fishing boat went down off the coast of Libya on April 18, 2015, in the Mediterranean’s deadliest shipwreck in living memory.
The pledge was made before Europe turned against migrants, and it just got even harder to keep. Nearing their very first formal identification, one of the investigators made a devastating discovery this month: The vessel carried not 800 people, as initially believed, but nearly 1,100.
Suddenly, there are hundreds more passengers to identify, adding to more than three years of painstaking work that had already pushed the boundaries of forensic science and tested the limits of both the Peruvian investigator with expertise in human rights violations and the Italian pathologist volunteering on the project.