Eritrean migrant rescued at sea dies of severe malnutrition

An Eritrean migrant rescued in the Mediterranean has died of severe malnutrition hours after arriving in Italy, a Spanish NGO reported on 13 March.

The 22-year-old Eritrean migrant named Segen was one of 93 desperate migrants taken onboard a rescue boat operated by Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms on 11 March. The rescue boat found the migrants adrift in the Mediterranean on the night of 10 March and took them to the port of Pozzallo in Sicily.
Proactiva Open Arms founder Oscar Camps announced Segan’s death in a Sicilian hospital on Twitter on Tuesday: “He was Eritrean and was imprisoned for 19 months in Libya.”

“Who knows how for long he hadn’t eaten. He was suffering from advanced organ wasting, he was skeletal,” said Carmelo Scarso, a doctor, talking to La Repubblica newspaper.

“We’ve seen plenty of worn out migrants, but this was beyond every limit,” he said.
The young man was in critical physical condition suffering from malnutrition and severe respiratory problems. As soon as the ship docked, he was transferred to a hospital where he died a few hours later.

Although Segen succumbed to death within few hours of rescue, Open Arms said they had found two people with even worse cases of malnutrition who had to be urgently evacuated from the ship.

Many of the migrants rescued by the NGO boat were suffering from malnutrition, exhaustion and dehydration.
“Yesterday we witnessed a tragic landing; we saw a horrible situation of malnutrition not only in the young man who unfortunately did not make it, but also in his traveling companions,” the mayor of Pozzallo, Roberto Ammatuna told La Repubblica newspaper.

“They were all skin and bone, they looked like they’d come out of a Nazi concentration camp… it was terrible,” Ammatuna said.

“Many of the migrants had scabies, but what really left us speechless was their physical condition. Men, women and children without any trace of flesh on them, just a jumble of bones,” he added.