There is a boat rusting away, abandoned in a parking lot in the port of Augusta. She is a boat strangely out of the water, carefully placed on metal trestles. Several interventions by marine engineers were required to set her there, as well as to insert the wooden blocks that keep her upright. Despite the care taken in positioning her, the boat is now hidden from view, stored in a parking lot owned by the Italian Navy, inaccessible without special authorization. She is barely visible from the peripheral road that runs alongside the port. What’s more, she has been placed in a deliberately offensive manner — to the boat herself, her history, and to those who fought to have her preserved: her stern faces inland, turning her back to the sea. The hull is flayed by the traces of her violent past: there is the hole caused by a collision that sank her ten years ago; two more gashes from the recovery operations that pulled her up from the seabed; and finally, deep incisions made to extract the bodies of the migrants who were trapped inside.
She is not the only boat left to rust in that port. The port of Augusta — one of Italy’s largest and deepest — with its so-called “boat cemetery,” hides several Italian political skeletons: the carcasses of discarded vessels, petrochemical pollution, and a NATO base. Around this port, and especially around this boat, Augusta’s civil society gathers year after year — to call for disarmament, to protest against aquifer contamination, or to demand open borders and freedom of movement.
In this article, we would like to tell you about this shipwreck , the one of April 18, 2015 in which more than 1,200 people lost their lives — the deadliest migrant massacre known to have occurred in the Mediterranean — and the commemoration organized for the tenth anniversary of this tragedy.
The massacre
Little is currently known about the vessel before her sinking. The large blue boat is 22.5 meters long, 7.1 meters wide, and 7.5 meters high and had no name, only an inscription in Arabic, barely visible today: بارك الله (blessed by Allah). Probably built in Tunisia, she was then purchased by Libyan people smugglers. A boat of this size usually carries a crew of 15 members, but as the sun set on 17 of April 2015 and the boat departed from a port near Garabulli, East of Tripoli, Libya, it is estimated that there was an average of five people per square meter, for a total of around 1,100 people, the vast majority of them crammed into the hold and engine room. The passengers on board came from a variety of routes and countries, including Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Nigeria, Pakistan, Senegal and Sudan, constituting a “mixed boat” typical of the mixed migration movements that characterized that period.
The passengers were 77 miles from the Libyan coast, 112 from Malta, and 131 from Lampedusa, Italy, when the vessel began to sink. In response to a distress call, a large commercial vessel, the King Jacob, was advised to carry out a rescue operation, but collided with the boat and contributed to the disaster. As has been well noted, it was the failure of an action rather than inaction that resulted in the mass death, making the people die by rescue. Only 28 people survived.
The recovery
The day after the tragedy, when news of the massacre dominated news media and social networks, the Italian prime minister put out a press release where he committed to recovering the sunk boat with the main purpose of “providing a proper burial to those who had lost their lives”. Elevating itself to the level of an Antigone who buries the dead as a political act, the Italian government glossed over the border policies that produce those deaths, including the VISA regime that force to travel across risky route, the decision to end the Mare Nostrum search and rescue operation, and its responsibility for sending an unequipped vessel to the recovery site. Instead, the prime minister used the commemoration, the burial, to justify its own interventions. The recovery of the boat thus initiated the parable of the social life of the relics and the bodies found, i.e. means through which to perform – and be endowed with – human dignity and the moral legitimacy of political action (see this article).
The salvage operation lasted a full year and was divided into five tranches that cost around €22 million. It is worth noting that all the salvage operations focused on recovering the boat’s most ‘valuable’ contents, i.e. the bodies of the migrants; the hull itself was not initially considered relevant, even as forensic evidence, since the bodies and their identity “were not useful for the investigation,” which aimed instead at accusing the two boat drivers of facilitating illegal immigration (public prosecutor A. Bonomo, personal communication, February 16, 2016). Italian authorities, in fact, consistently refuse to follow international obligations regarding the identification of the deceased and respect for their families’ requests for truth and justice.
After an initial phase concerned with recovering the bodies from the sea-bed, a year after the tragedy the boat was lifted by a special hold and transported to the NATO base at Melilli, next to the town of Augusta. The final stage of the “Operation Melilli” focused on emptying the boat and analyzing the bodies, carried out by a team of forensic experts from the University of Milan (LABANOF), along with the DVI Unit of the Catania Scientific Police, and forensic experts from a range of Italian universities. Medical examiners and research students ascertained the deaths of 723 people, although researchers also collected the fragmentary remains of other individuals; 217 bodies had been found on the seabed near the wreck, and the others were extracted from different parts of the boat.
Image of the wreck taken by the Italian Navy
The anthropologist Amade M’Chreck referred to the latter operation as a complex “forensic infrastructure” within the military base, which had as its goal not only cadaveric cataloging in order to identify the people who died in the ship and centralize the data for the analyses, but also to set guidelines for future extra-judicial analyses to be performed for identifying deceased migrants. Yet, for those actors who enact “Operation Melilli”, it represented an excellent prospect for study and career advancement, while in terms of identification it could be easily defined an unsuccess.
Stories to be told
There are many stories hidden in plain sight in the history of this boat. You can glimpse them in the cuts that flay the wreck, in the splintering wood, and the dripping rust.
There is the story of how the boat was transported to the Venice Biennale — a gesture that was accused of turning the commemoration of such tragedies into a spectacle, a kind of whitewashing that exploited the suffering associated with the migrant crisis, transforming the wreck into an object for the artistic elite to mourn something morally bankrupt and macabre (see Eleonor Pynter’s Emergency in Transit, University of California Press).
There is also the story of how the remains on board were never officially identified, despite the involvement of two cutting-edge forensic interventions. On one side, the already mentioned work of the LABANOF team in Milan. On the other, the contribution of forensic experts from the International Committee of the Red Cross, who adapted identification procedures developed in Argentina for the cases of the desaparecidos to the context of the April 18 shipwreck. Their work allowed for the reconstruction not only of the identities of the recovered bodies, but also of the web of relationships, and the social, economic, and political circumstances that led the passengers to be on that boat. Drawing on the testimonies of survivors, family members, and witnesses, this approach offers something more: a possible way out of the dead end — both political and practical — into which the forensic turn and its obsession with biological traces has often led us.
Among these stories, and probably among the more pivotal to be told, there is also that of Abas Mdai, who has been searching for news of his brother since 2015. Based on passenger reconstructions carried out by the ICRC, it is possible that Abas’s brother was on that boat that tragic night. Despite DNA sampling and extensive forensic reconstruction, the Mdai family has yet to receive any news — no body to mourn, no death certificate, not even a certainty about their loved one’s fate. This is a story of waiting, false hopes, and uncertainty — like that of so many others seeking truth and justice, suspended in an unresolved, ambiguous grief.
The story of Sekou Diabate, instead, is that of one of the few who managed to survive that night, in that shipwreck. He threw himself into the water and swam as long as he could, until he saw a life jacket that pulled him up. While many celebrate the rescue, it’s important to remember that it was the very ship that responded to the SOS which caused the wave that led to the disaster. In that shipwreck, Diabate lost along with many fellow travelers also a cousin — a body he has never been able to recover. The wish of Sekou and his family, including the cousin’s son, is to repatriate the remains. What stands in the way is not so much the cost of repatriation, but the lack of a DNA match with the identifying code of the remains. It is shocking that, after so much money was spent to retrieve the bodies, ten years later the identification process has still not been officially completed.
Commemoraction in Augusta, April 2025. Picture : Giorgia Mirto
Sekou’s story — like that of the 28 other survivors — ties the tragedy to the struggle for legal recognition. After being rescued and arriving in Italy, the then 23-year-old was taken to a reception center: “After everything we had been through, they took us and placed us in a camp. They didn’t even grant us asylum,” Sekou recounts. He was moved from one center to another and worked as a seasonal laborer picking tomatoes in Puglia. Some of the other survivors went to France and came back, always for underpaid seasonal work. In doing so, due to Salvini’s ‘Security Laws’, they lost any chance of legalizing their status in Italy. “I only managed to convert my permit into a work visa a few years ago,” Sekou adds, “and I find it absurd. We migrants don’t count for anything — not even in the face of tragedies like this.”
The commemoration
To weave a connecting thread between these untold stories, the April 18 Committee of Augusta organized a commemoration at the site of the wrecked boat. Constituted specifically “for the purpose of preserving the memory of the tragic shipwreck” (Enzo Parisi, private conversation, 2020), the Committee is made up of various local organizations such as Legambiente, the local parish, and the CGIL trade union. It is a collective of grassroots activists who, through their long-standing engagement in local environmental, cultural, and social struggles, have extended their efforts to supporting migrants — both the living and the dead.
Year after year, from the ground up, they remember the tragedy and denounce the failures of Italian and local institutions, the state of abandonment in which the boat lies, and the indifference of a society that continues to sacrifice human lives on the altar of borders.
Over time, the Committee has invited several key figures from these interwoven stories, including Father Mussie Zerai, one of the early founders of the Alarm Phone network. This year, Sekou Diabate also came and stood beneath the boat — offering a powerful, living testimony not only of the injustices of that night, but also of the conditions in which people on the move are forced to live in Italy even after surviving such tragedies. His words were a reminder of the hypocrisy of the Italian government, that appropriates these events for political display, without changing the policies that cause them.
Abas Mdai, too, was present — though through a video message. Alongside him were other members of local civil society, including Carovane Migranti, the Ro La Formichina cooperative, and several ships of the Civil Fleet such as Sea Punk, Louise Michel, and ResQ. Together, we renewed our collective outcry against borders and the visa regime — systems that enforce a racialized differentiation between those who are free to move and those who are forced to risk their lives and, if they survive, to continue living them in a cycle of labor exploitation.
To remember that tragedy today is not only a duty of memory, but a moral imperative. Every unnamed victim, every untold story, demands justice, dignity, and humanity. We cannot allow that pain to fade with time or be reduced to a cold statistic. This is our story — we are all on that boat — and together with the families of the victims and the survivors, local activists and international movements, it is our responsibility to build a movement that says, once and for all: never again.
Giorgia Mirto (Columbia University) and Filippo Furri (Institut Convergences migrations)
Testimony from Abass Ndiaye, looking for his missing brother
Good morning dear friends,
My name is Abass Ndiaye, I live in Louga, Senegal. I am looking for my older brother. He left from Mauritania to Libya in 2015, hoping to reach Italy. He left behind his pregnant wife and his son, Mohamed Ndiaye. But since that day, we haven’t heard anything from him.
Recently, I did some research on Facebook and found someone who looks a lot like him. I downloaded the photo from Facebook and reposted it on my own account (Bassethebosse Ndiaye). Many people who knew him told me that the person in the photo looks a lot like my brother. We are asking for help.
I have spoken with the Italian and Senegalese Red Cross. The Italian Red Cross came here in 2019 to collect DNA samples for testing, but since then, we haven’t received any news about the DNA test results. The family is still waiting.
We are asking for help through this Facebook account. We are also looking for anyone who knew him in Libya in 2015 or who arrived in Italy that same year. His name is Ndiaye Dame, son of Mayor Ndiaye and Yassim Go. He is also known by the nickname Muduchar Ndiaye, and his native village is Matacham Nday.
