New Delhi: After hundreds are feared to have drowned in the Mediterranean last week, a humanitarian organisation has circulated a photograph of a drowned migrant baby in the arms of a German rescuer. The image of a year old kid revives the memory of the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish beach last year and becoming a tragic emblem of Europe’s migration crisis.
The baby, who appears to be no more, was pulled from the sea on Friday after the capsizing of a wooden boat. German humanitarian organisation Sea-Watch, operating a rescue boat in the sea between Libya and Italy, distributed the picture which showed a rescuer cradling the child like a sleeping baby.
Forty-five bodies arrived in the southern Italian port of Reggio Calabria on Sunday aboard an Italian navy ship, which picked up 135 survivors from the same incident.
The rescuer said that he had spotted the baby in the water like a doll, arms outstretched.
“I took hold of the forearm of the baby and pulled the light body protectively into my arms at once, as if it were still alive ... It held out its arms with tiny fingers into the air, the sun shone into its bright, friendly but motionless eyes,” the rescuer said.
The rescuer further said that he began to sing to comfort himself and to give some kind of expression to this incomprehensible.
Like the photograph of the three-year-old Syrian boy Aylan lying lifeless on a Turkish beach last year, the image puts a human face on the more than 8000 people who have died in the Mediterranean since the start of 2014.
