Girl, 11, survived three days in the sea after shipwreck

An 11-year-old girl survived three days in stormy seas by clinging to two tire inner-tubes after the migrant boat she was traveling on sank off the coast of Italy, a charity said.

The girl was discovered by chance by the Trotamar III, a boat belonging to the refugee rescue charity Compass Collective, and was likely the only survivor among 45 people on board when her vessel sank off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa, the nonprofit said in a statement Wednesday.

“It was an incredible coincidence that we heard the child’s voice despite the engine running,” Matthias Wiedenlübbert, the Trotamar III’s skipper, said in the German charity’s press release.

The crew heard the child’s calls at 3:20 a.m. local time and immediately began a maneuver in the darkness to save her, alerting the rescue control center in Rome, Italy, before later handing her over to the rescue service on Lampedusa.

The 11-year-old’s boat had originally departed from Sfax, a port city on Tunisia’s central coast, before hitting the days-long storm that prevented many rescue boats from setting sail.

The girl, who is from Sierra Leone, told rescuers that she had last been in contact with two other people in the water two days earlier but had not seen them since.

She was found with the two inner-tubes and a life-vest and “had no drinking water or food with her, and although she was suffering from hypothermia, she was responsive and alert,” Compass Collective added.

The central Mediterranean route between Tunisia, Libya, Italy, and Malta is one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world, with over 24,300 deaths or disappearances since 2014, the organization’s website states.

Over 30,900 people have disappeared or died in the Mediterranean since 2014, according to the Missing Migrants Project by the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The IOM says it is likely that many more deaths remain unrecorded.

While they typically assist larger vessels, the crew of the 13-meter-long German Trotamar III sometimes perform urgent sea rescues as they did in this case. The vessel has saved 1,653 people in distress at sea since it began its operation in August 2023, Compass Collective said.

While the crew searched for other survivors from the girl’s vessel, its skipper Wiedenlübbert added, “after the storm that lasted for days with… 2.5-meter-high (8 feet) waves, it was hopeless.”

Nicola Dell’Arciprete, head of the U.N. children’s agency Unicef in Italy, said in a post on X that “our thoughts go to the girl who landed today in Lampedusa, [the] sole survivor of yet another shipwreck in the Mediterranean Sea.”

“Every life matters,” he added Wednesday. “We need safe routes, search and rescue are needed. Protecting children is a duty.”