ROME – Two children died and one was missing in Maltese waters, according to the coast guard. 

 The children are believed to all belong to the same mother and the parents are among the survivors, who were taken to Lampedusa on Monday. 

 The boat was carrying migrants who originated from Nigeria and the Cameroon. 

 The bodies of the two little boys, aged 2 and 3, were recovered Monday evening at Lampedusa and were brought to the mortuary at Cala Pisana. 

 The survivors where recovered by the NGO Sea Punks at 53 nautical miles from the largest of the Peliagie Islands.

 “A mother has lost her three children. One in the arms of a medic on board, who tried to revive him with CPR, one was recovered as a corpse, the other is still lost. It was heart-breaking” said Arturo Centore, chief of the Sea Punks. 

 17 survivors were safely rescued by the humanitarian ship, two of whom were a pregnant woman and a man who had ingested a lot of water, were in need of urgent medical care and were transferred to Valetta, the capital of Malta. 

 “We were not expecting to find what we saw” said Centore to Radio Radicale. 

 The boat has received an SOS alarm from a vessel four to five hours away and then around 7 they received notice of another location, very close to them. 

 The chief alerted the crew, then one of the guards saw some containers of petrol floating in the water. 

 “I didn’t have time to alert the intercom before we saw some heads in the water and then heard yelling” continued Centore.

 “I stopped the ship […] we put the lifeboat into the sea and began to save the survivors. A boy was clinging to the wreck of boat, which went up and down in the water because it had completely sunk.”

 The survivors told the crew that they were 21 in total, 18 made it onto the ship, including the child who died immediately. 

 The rest were not found.

“They were all wet, distressed and in a state of hypothermia.”

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