ITALIAN POLICE SAY they have arrested a group of African migrants after witnesses said they threw 12 passengers overboard following a row about religion on a boat headed to Italy.
The deadly dispute, which saw a group of Muslim passengers allegedly attack a group of Christian passengers, coincided with reports of a new migrant drowning tragedy and comes as Italy struggles to cope with a huge influx of boat migrants.
Four days after a migrant shipwreck off the coast of Libya, in which 400 people are believed to have died, another 41 migrants were missing feared drowned Thursday after their dinghy sank en route to Italy, the International Organization for Migration said.
The stricken vessel was spotted by a plane, which alerted the Italian coastguard but by the time a navy ship arrived at the spot only four passengers were found alive.
The four survivors, who came from Nigeria, Ghana and Niger, said they were part of a group of 45 people that set sail from Libya.
In a separate incident, a group of migrants rescued by an Italian vessel related a deadly standoff over religion in their dinghy, which ended in 12 Nigerian and Ghanaian passengers being drowned, the police said.
The victims were “of Christian faith, compared to their attackers who were of Muslim faith,” police in the Sicilian port of Palermo said in a statement.
Fifteen migrants were arrested on suspicion of “multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate”, the statement added.
The incident aboard the vessel, which was carrying about 100 migrants, took place in the Strait of Sicily, between Tunisia and Italy.
According to a group of Nigerian and Ghanaian survivors, a fight broke out over religion, with a group of Muslim passengers threatening the Nigerians and Ghanaians after they declared themselves to be Christians.
“The threats then materialised and 12 people, all Nigerian and Ghanaian, are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean,” the police statement added.
The remaining passengers were rescued and brought to Palermo, where the 15 alleged attackers, who came from Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal, were arrested.
- © AFP 2015.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say