A courageous scientist is attempting to identify the badly decomposed remains of 700 people who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea.
Few migrants who perish at sea are ever positively identified, even though the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates that as many as 20,000 people have died in the last decade making Mediterranean crossings. The corpses are typically photographed with a code that may include their sex, if identifiable, and the date they were brought to shore—that’s it. They are buried in donated cemetery plots in graves marked with their codes. It is nearly impossible for loved ones to find them because the graves are spread across places such as the islands of Sicily, Lampedusa and Malta. The photos are almost always kept by parish priests who mind the anonymous graves. Sometimes, the number of dead are reported to the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, but the nationalities are generally logged as “unknown.” There is no central database that connects the photos and numbers and burial locations. And there is certainly no collection and cataloguing of DNA.
