Italian
prosecutors are investigating the deaths of 26 Nigerian women - most of them
teenagers - whose bodies were recovered at sea.
There are
suspicions that they may have been sexually abused and murdered as they
attempted to cross the Mediterranean.
Five migrants are
being questioned in the southern port of Salerno.
A Spanish
warship, Cantabria, docked there carrying 375 migrants and the dead women,
following several rescues.
Twenty-three of
the dead women had been on a rubber boat with 64 other people.
Italian media
report that the women's bodies are being kept in a refrigerated section of the
warship. Most of them were aged 14-18.
Most of the 375
survivors brought to Salerno were sub-Saharan Africans, from Nigeria, Senegal,
Ghana, The Gambia and Sudan, the daily La Repubblica reports.
Among them were
90 women - eight of them pregnant - and 52 children.
There were also
some Libyan men and women on board.
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, according to the Italian aid
group L'Abbraccio.
Many migrants
have reported violence, including torture and sexual abuse, by the gangs.
In the year to 1
November, 150,982 migrants arrivedin southern Europe by boat from North Africa, the International Organizationfor Migration (IOM) reports.
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.
Source: BBC
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