Italian Doctor Fights To Shed Light On Mediterranean's Migrant Dead

Paris, Sept 8 (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 8th Sep, 2019 ) :For Cristina Cattaneo, the thousands of migrants who have died trying to reach Europe's shores in recent years deserve the same as any other disaster victims: a concerted effort to find out who they were and let their families know the painful truth about their fate.

"The dead need to be identified -- not for the dead, they are lost, but for the living. People need to bury and identify and grieve their dead," Cattaneo, an Italian forensic pathologist, told AFP in an interview.

Since 2013, the laboratory she heads at the University of Milan has been waging a lonely fight to piece together a life from the photos or love letters, school reports and bits of clothing carried by migrants, who have drowned trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.

Many younger victims from Eritrea and Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, she said, also tuck away small pouches of soil from their homelands -- just like the leaves and flowers that Cattaneo herself stashed away on summer trips back to Italy after moving to Canada as a child.

"I was putting them in my pocket to remind me of the place I loved," she said.

"If people could see what these adolescents had in their pockets, they would understand that they are actually us."