Italian prosecutors have started investigations into the deaths of 26 Nigerian women whose bodies were recovered at sea.
There are suspicions that the victims, who are mostly aged 14-18, were sexually abused and murdered as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean, the BBC reported on Monday.
Five migrants are being questioned in the southern port of Salerno.
Several rescues led to the finding of the bodies in a Spanish Warship, Cantabria, carrying 375 migrants and the dead women. 23 of the women had been on a rubber boat woth 64 other people.
Italian media reported that the women’s bodies were being kept in a refrigerated section of the warship. Most of the 375 survivors brought to Salerno were sub-Saharan Africans from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, The Gambia and Sudan.
Among them were 90 women, eight of them pregnant, 52 children and some Libyan men and women on board, the report said.
People-smuggling gangs charge each migrant about $6,000 to get to Italy, $4,000 of which is for the trans-Saharan journey to Libya and many migrants have reported violence, including torture and sexual abuse, by the gangs.
