The dramatic rescue of an immigrant "abandoned to his fate" in the Mediterranean

When the rescuers arrived, they only found one inflatable boat destroyed and three bodies floating in the sea, two women and a small child.

When they approached, they discovered that one of the women was alive, "holding an arm of wood," as they later recounted it.

The other woman and the child, who had been drifting 150 kilometers from the Libyan coast in the Mediterranean, had been dead for hours before being discovered by the NGO Spanish Proactiva Open Arms

• Who should take care of ships with rescued migrants in the Mediterranean Sea

There are different versions of what happened

Proactive Open Arms said that the three Libyan coastguards had left their fate to their fate. He said that they left the women and the child there when they refused to board their patrol boat.

The Libyan Coast Guard disputes this claim. He said that he had rescued 165 immigrants who were traveling in the damaged boat and recovered the body of a baby.

But he did not give details of how the women and the boy were left adrift on the remains of the inflatable boat. In a statement, the Libyan Coast Guard said: "It is not in our religion, in our ethics or in our conduct to abandon human lives at sea, where we are only to save them."

"The migrants were burned and dehydrated afterwards, spending more than 60 hours drifting into the sea."

• "I saw a lot of deaths, but nothing like it": images of A frenetic rescue of immigrants in the Mediterranean

Rescuers reported that the survivor, who was identified as Josepha, a Cameroonian woman of 40 years, was "in a stable but traumatized state" and she added that she needed medical attention and "urgent" psychological therapy.

This is the daily tragedy of thousands of people who risk their lives by fleeing poverty or war in their country and who often die trying.

Proactiva Open Arms is one of the many NGOs that operate in the lethal Mediterranean route of migrants trying to reach Europe from North Africa, mainly Libya.

But these organizations were now blocked by Italy and Malta, which do not allow the entry of rescue vessels into their ports

• Spain receives 630 rescued migrants in the Mediterranean rejected by Malta and Italy

The new Italian populist government has promised to stop the flow of migrants into the Mediterranean and has granted aid to the Libyan authorities to increase their efforts to reduce the migration.

But human rights defenders criticize this aid because they say that migrants sent back to Libya, after their ships have been intercepted at sea, are likely to be abused and tortured.

Proactive Open Arms claims that the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted the boat carrying some 170 migrants but when the two women and the child refused to board the Coast Guard patrol, they "destroyed the boat and abandoned them ". 19659007] "I want to denounce … the Libyan coastguards because he did not know how to deal with an emergency situation, arriving two days and two nights late and abandoning two women and one child in the wreck of the boat that they destroyed ". The founder of Open Arms, Oscar Camps, told Reuters:

Camps said that a merchant ship that was sailing in the area also did not offer any. assistance to migrants.

He added: the direct consequence of not allowing NGOs that save lives in the Mediterranean to work there, is the consequence. "

Illegal immigration into Europe across the Mediterranean has drastically declined over the past decade, according to data from the International Organization for Migration (IOM), some 170,000 people have managed to to reach the continent in this way.

In 2015, the figure was more than a million, almost five times more than the year before 19659007] However, this decline did not has been reflected in the number of people killed in the dangerous journey.

In 2015, the IOM calculates that 5,350 migrants died at sea. In 2017 the figure was 3,116 dead

• The "war" little known between the boats that help and those trying to stop the boats with the migrants in the Mediterranean

The case of Josepha, the migrant from Cameroon, realized to attract the international attention because in the one of the Open Arms ships traveled the Spanish Marc Gas ol, one of the best basketball players in the NBA.

Gasol went aboard the Astral, which sailed next to the Open Arms, the boat that saved the woman

The basketball player explained to the newspaper El País in Spain what made him participate in these rescue initiatives.

"We have to show the example, show the seriousness of what is happening." The risk I can take to be an NBA player goes to a third plane, there is no better than the volunteers here, with whom I live. and you see that everything is done for the common good. "

And about what he found when he arrived at the wreckage, the basketball player said," At first it seemed like no one was alive, but we we are close together. I saw that there was a woman, she was holding only one arm to a piece of wood that should have been two feet, no more. There was another woman and a dead child. "

Now you can receive notifications from BBC Mundo Download the new version of our application and activate them to not miss our best content.

_