On a 15 meter-long boat landed on the island of Lampedusa, southern Italy, the Italian coastguards found 25 bodies of dead migrants coming from Libya.

According to Reuters news agency on board were 296 people, including 36 women and 21 children. They are all refugees fleeing from Sub Saharan Africa.

The 25 bodies were found in the engine room of the boat during a rescue operation a mile away from Lampedusa. The victims were all men except of one woman, and most of them were young. They

During last night, when the boat was around 35 miles off Lampedusa, the coastguards got a call from the mobile phone of one of the migrants on board. The bodies were no mentioned in the call and the rescuers couldn’t imagine what was to be discovered in the hold. From the first reconstructions of the events the 25 victims seem to be dead of asphyxiation by the engine fumes.

The only access for the engine room was a 50 centimeters wide trapdoor. The space was insufficient for all those passengers, and the gas from the engine made the hold’s air unbreathable.

The corpses were already in state of decomposition, for this reason investigators believe that the migrants died in international waters.

Doctor Pietro Bartolo said to reporters “Given the state in which the corpses were found, they could have been dead for at least 48 hours”.

A survivor told also that another man was dropped overboard, some sources reported he was already dead, others that he was still alive.

Italian police keeps on questioning the survivors and the corpses will be subjected to postmortem examination to understand  the real causes of death. The boat is under sequestration and an inquiry has been set up.

Another tragedy in the way of the hope to Lampedusa Island, the gate of Europe for the North African refugees.

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The 27-year-old troubled British Singer Amy Winehouse was found dead in North London today, according to The Metropolitan Police. The Black to Black crooner was most recently through a very public relapse of her drug and alcohol addiction and was forced to cancel her European tour dates after disastrous performances and bad publicity. She had earlier this week been attending her goddaughter Dionne Bromfield’s performance at the iTunes festival where she failed to join in for the song Mama Said but grabbed the mic, urging the crowd to buy her protegé’s album.

The London Ambulance Service was called to the flat this afternoon, shortly after 4PM, GMT but the arriving officers found Amy Winehouse dead at the scene. The police is treating her death as ‘unexplained’ according to the Daily Mail, a British newspaper and the circumstances are currently being investigated.

It is unknown whether the singer’s closest family have been informed of her death.

Amy Winehouse recently cancelled her European come-back tour after an embarrassing concert in Belgrade, Serbia where she staggered on stage and gave a incoherent performance that was cut short because of her state and the audience’s anger. She has battled addiction for years and had a stint in rehabilitation as late as May this year. Earlier today, Tim Gatt from Sky News tweeted that Winehouse was withdrawing from all scheduled performances until further notice, according to her manager. The statement seems ironic in the face of her death.

She first rose to stardom at age 20 with her debut album Frank, but it was the Black to Black album from 2006 that earned her worldwide acclaim and winning her five Grammy Awards.

UPDATE:

Tim Gatt informs that Amy Winehouse’s father now knows of her death. Her father Mitch was on his way to a Jazz Festival in New York but according to singer Michelle Gayle “Mitch does know. He’s arrived in New York…They are devastated.” In an interview in 2008, Winehouse’s mother Janis said she would be ‘unsurprised’ if her daughter died before her.

Image provided by megamusicbox

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