How an 11-year-old girl survived 3 days alone at sea after shipwreck?

ROME: An 11-year-old girl from Sierra Leone was rescued overnight after three days at sea as the sole survivor of a shipwreck off Italy’s Lampedusa island, a rescue charity said on Wednesday.

Germany’s CompassCollective said crew on its vessel were en route to another emergency when they heard shouting from the water and picked up the girl around 3 am wearing a life jacket and hanging on to a pair of tyre tubes.

She told them she had set off from the Tunisian city of Sfax in a metal boat carrying 45 people that sank in a storm.

Charity crew took care of the girl and took her to Lampedusa which is closer to North Africa than the rest of Italy and is often a first landing point for migrants.

After medical assistance, the girl was moved to a migrant holding centre where Italian Red Cross staff and volunteers were looking after her, CompassCollective added in a statement.

“In this festive period, in which the majority of us is lucky to be with their loved ones, my thoughts go out to the girl from Sierra Leone,” said Nicola Dell’Arciprete, head of UN children’s agency UNICEF in Italy.

“Yet another tragedy that increases the number of dead and missing in the Central Mediterranean.”

The sea migration route between Tunisia, Libya, Italy and Malta is one of the most dangerous in the world, with more than 24,300 disappeared or dying since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration.

Italy says its hardline approach on immigration is contributing to a fall in sea arrivals

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In the year to date, it has recorded around 64,000 migrant landings, compared to more than 153,000 in the same period of 2023.

In a similar incident in Spain on Wednesday, at least six migrants died trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands using precarious boats from West Africa.

Five of 65 migrants aboard an open-topped boat that reached the tiny island of El Hierro overnight were found dead, said the emergency services, while another migrant was found dead in one of three other vessels rescued by the Spanish coastguard.

The number of migrants reaching Spain’s Canary Islands hit an all-time annual high for a second year in a row in 2024 and the seven islands off northwestern Africa are struggling to absorb a surge of people arriving on crammed boats seeking better opportunities in Europe.