Shipwreck
The Documentary Podcast
BBC
4.3 • 2.7K Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2022
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In April 2015, more than 1000 refugees and migrants drowned when the old fishing boat they were travelling on sank in the Mediterranean. It was the area's worst shipwreck since World War Two.
But the people who died are not forgotten. Not by their families and friends, and not by a professor of forensic pathology at the University of Milan.
“There’s a body that needs to be identified, you identify it. This is the first commandment of forensic medicine,” says Dr Cristina Cattaneo.
Assignment tells the story of the raising of the fishing boat from the Mediterranean's seabed, and Dr Cattaneo's efforts to begin to identify the people who lost their lives on that moonless night on the edge of Europe.
Producer/presenter: Linda Pressly
(This programme was originally broadcast in December 2020)
(Image: Ibrahima Senghor, a survivor of the tragedy of 18 April, 2015 - he was prevented from boarding the boat in Libya. Credit: Ibrahima Senghor)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thanks very much for choosing to download assignment from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:04.6 | In the last few years we've become accustomed to hearing stories about refugees and migrants |
| 0:09.0 | who die on their journey north. |
| 0:11.6 | Now those tragic tales rarely even make our news bulletins. |
| 0:15.5 | But those people aren't forgotten. |
| 0:17.5 | Certainly not by their families, nor by one of Italy's eminent forensic pathologists. |
| 0:23.5 | Some of you might find this documentary upsetting, it's not easy listening, but it's also |
| 0:27.9 | a strangely life-enhancing, a story of endeavour, commitment and remembrance. |
| 0:34.2 | So here's the migrant shipwreck that rose again. |
| 0:47.8 | It's Saturday, April 18, 2015, before dawn, a Libyan beach east of Tripoli. |
| 0:54.6 | Bobbing on the waves is an elderly 20-meter-long sky blue fishing boat. |
| 0:59.7 | On its bow there's an inscription in Arabic, blessed by Allah, it says. |
| 1:04.9 | We were all on the beach from three till six in the morning. |
| 1:11.7 | We were in groups of a hundred, then more people arrived and got on the boat. |
| 1:17.3 | Seven of the groups boarded to. |
| 1:20.1 | We could see it was heavily loaded and then they announced the boat was full. |
| 1:25.5 | I said, that's impossible. |
| 1:27.4 | I insisted that I had to go to. |
| 1:31.2 | Although he'd paid them, the people traffickers wouldn't let Ibrahim Asengor get on the boat |
| 1:35.6 | with no name bound for Italy. |
| 1:37.9 | They prioritized people with US dollars cash. |
| 1:41.5 | We now know more than a thousand migrants and refugees occupied every tiny space on that |
... |
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