Italy Immigrants - Underwater video of sunken ship to prove 1996 deadly collision
TAPE: EF01/0469
IN_TIME: 22:26:31
DURATION: 2:56
SOURCES: La Repubblica/APTN
RESTRICTIONS:
DATELINE: Rome- 15 June 2001/ Recent
SHOTLIST:
La Repubblica - Recent
1. Various of underwater video purporting to show sunken ship and bodies of would-be immigrants who drowned trying to reach Europe's southern coast in 1997
APTN - 15 June 2001
2. Two exterior shots La Repubblica building
3. Various set up shots Giovanni Maria Bellu, La Repubblica journalist
4. SOUNDBITE: (Italian) Giovanni Maria Bellu, La Repubblica journalist
"We dragged a vast area but not certainly not the whole, and there was a place where the camera filmed some remains of human corpses. At first fairly scattered and then more dense as we got closer to the wreck. The most shocking thing was that the pictures confirmed the reports of the survivors who were not believed at the time, that the boat was rammed by a second boat and intact on the side there is a huge gash."
5. Cutaway diagram of boat
6. SOUNDBITE: (Italian) Giovanni Maria Bellu, La Repubblica journalist
"There was no serious research done, if a real search had been done then the fisherman of Portopaolo would have been under great pressure and would not have been able to throw the bodies
back into the water."
7. Shot of newspaper headline and article
STORYLINE:
An Italian newspaper on Friday published what it said were pictures of a sunken ship and bodies of would-be immigrants who drowned trying to reach Europe's southern coast nearly five years ago.
The pictures, taken from an underwater video shot about two weeks ago, document one of the worst such immigrant tragedies in Italian waters in recent years.
About 280 people - mainly from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka - are believed to have died when the boat went down on December 26, 1996.
The daily La Repubblica said it commissioned the search for the wreckage because the tragedy had been ignored for so long.
They accused the authorities of treating the accident as a 'fisherman's tale.'
Survivors said the accident happened in the Mediterranean between Malta and Sicily, after a Honduran-flagged cargo ship carrying some 300 immigrants collided with a vessel that was to take them to a European port.
The crash sent the smaller vessel to the bottom of the sea.
After 29 survivors made it to Greece, rescue teams from both Italy and Greece searched the area, but reported no bodies or wreckage.
La Repubblica said the wreck was lying in international waters off the coast of Portopalo, a port village in southern Sicily, at a depth of 108 meters (356 feet).
The newspaper said bodies floated up in Portopalo for several weeks, but fishermen who found them simply tossed them back into the sea.
It quoted several villagers as saying the fishermen didn't want to waste time to with police reports.
Several of the photos showed skeletons half-buried under the sand or trapped inside the ship.
Another showed a shoe.
Others showed the wreckage of the 18-meter (59-foot) vessel.
And what turned out to be a fatal journey for so many people didn't come cheap.
Survivors said they paid between 5 and 8 thousand U-S dollars for the voyage.