How shipwreck girl, 11, was found after floating alone in Mediterranean for days
Rescue boat captain said it was an ‘incredible coincidence’ crew heard the girl calling out from Mediterranean waters
An 11-year-old girl from Sierra Leone was found floating in the Mediterranean Sea off Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa, believed to be the only survivor of a shipwrecked migrant boat that had departed from the port of Sfax in Tunisia, a humanitarian group said on Thursday.
The girl was saved by a German-flagged sailboat named Trotamar III, which brought her to Lampedusa on Wednesday morning, according to the German charity Compass Collective that has been operating in the Mediterranean Sea since August 2023.
She had neither food nor water with her, and was suffering from hypothermia.
“It was an incredible coincidence that we heard the voice of a girl even though the motors were running,’’ the sailboat’s captain, Matthias Weidenluebbert, said in a press statement.
The crew immediately cut the engines and searched for the source of the voice, Compass Collective’s Katja Tempel, told Associated Press.
“She was exhausted and tired and cold, but in general, she was fine when we fetched her out of the water,” Tempel said of the child.
