BY EDNA CHRISTENSENIN.
Italian prosecutors are investigating the deaths of 26 Nigerian women - majority teenagers - whose bodies were recovered at sea.
The women's bodies were found in the Mediterranean by a Spanish vessel, which lowered a "seemingly endless line of black plastic body bags" onto a port in Salerno, according to Agence France-Presse.
Rescuers recover a dead body from the Spanish ship Cantabria in the harbor of Salerno, Italy, on Sunday. That ship had carried out other Mediterranean rescues and had 374 rescued migrants on board. But the Italian government, facing an unending flow of people from Africa and an increase in anti-migrant sentiments from its people, wants to limit the thousands of refugees arriving on its shores each month.
The broadcaster adds that "twenty-three of the dead women had been on a rubber boat with 64 other people".
Maihajja, who was represented by the South-West Zonal Coordinator of the agency, Suleiman Yakubu, at the airport, said the state should not be stigmatised as numerous returnees were also from some south-western states and other parts of the country.
The victims, who are mostly teenagers, aged 14-18, are believed to have been sexually abused and murdered as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean.
"It's a tragedy. The prosecutor's office will begin looking into it immediately", Salerno's prefect Salvatore Malfi said. The bodies were placed in coffins, AFP reported.
"The sex trafficking routes are different". Women might also try to rescue their children from drowning, putting them at greater risk of death.
Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera recently reported on an uptick in young Nigerian women and girls trafficked into Italy and forced into prostitution.
In March this year, 128 migrants, comprising Nigerians and other West Africans, had died in the space of 20 days while crossing the sea, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said then.
According to Italy's interior ministry, more than 111,700 people have reached the country by sea in the first 10 months of 2017, 30 percent down on the previous year.
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