26 Dead African Women Found In Spanish Sea.

The bodies of 26 female migrants who apparently drowned have arrived at the Italian port of Salerno as rescues intensify on the Mediterranean Sea, the U.N. refugee agency said.

The bodies were transferred to the Italian mainland aboard a Spanish naval ship carrying another 400 migrants rescued during four operations in the central Mediterranean.

Twenty-three of the dead women were on a rubber dinghy that sank off Libya two days ago, Marco Rotunno, a spokesman in Italy for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees spokesman, said. Another 60 people were pulled to safety, but more may have perished at sea, Rotunno said.

The other three women died in a separate shipwreck.

Humanitarian groups say some 2,500 migrants were picked up at sea over the last four or five days, making it the most intense period for rescues on the Mediterranean since Italy reached a deal with Libya this summer to slow departures of smugglers' boats carrying migrants. In the same short and recent period, 37 bodies have been recovered, the Italian news agency ANSA said.

The number of migrants arriving in Italy so far this year is 30 percent lower than last year, 111,716 through Friday compared to nearly 160,000 in the same period of 2016, according to Interior Ministry figures.

The U.N.'s International Organization for Migration put the number of dead in the center Mediterranean route from Libya to Italy at over 2,600 through Nov. 1.

INVESTIGATION

Italian prosecutors have commenced investigations into the deaths of 26 Nigerian women whose bodies were recovered at sea, BBC reported on Monday.

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.

Following several rescues, their bodies were discovered in a Spanish warship, Cantabria, carrying 375 migrants and the dead women; 23 of whom women had been on a rubber boat with 64 other people.

Italian media reported that the women’s bodies were being kept in a refrigerated section of the warship. Most of the 375 survivors brought to Salerno were sub-Saharan Africans from Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana, The Gambia and Sudan.

Among the 375 survivors were 90 women, eight of them pregnant, 52 children and some Libyan men and women on board.

People-smuggling gangs charge each migrant about $6,000 (£4,578) to get to Italy, $4,000 of which is for the trans-Saharan journey to Libya and many migrants have reported violence, including torture and sexual abuse, by the gangs.

Five migrants are being questioned in the southern port of Salerno.

Thousands of Nigerians travel through the desert to Libya from where they try to cross the Mediterranean to Italy seeking better life.

Hundreds of such Nigerians, who could not make the crossing, end up getting trapped in Libya with many of them eventually returning to Nigeria with the help of the International Organisation for Migration.