Italy was shaken over the weekend by the deaths of six young Egyptians who drowned while trying to swim 20 metres from a wooden fishing boat to the shore, and whose bodies were laid out in bags beside sun umbrellas on a popular Sicilian beach.
The prosecutor of Catania, Sicily's second city, opened an investigation after the boat, which had been carrying more than 100 migrants from Egypt and Syria, ran aground on a sandbar near the Lido Verde resort.
Among the 98 survivors were about 50 minors, many of them small children, he said.
It was suspected that the six men who died, and who were identified on Sunday as Egyptians between 17 and 27 years old, may not have known how to swim. The Ansa news agency reported that the youngest was to have turned 18 this month.
According to the UN, about 8,400 migrants and asylum seekers landed on the coasts of Italy and Malta during the first six months of this year, many of them from Egypt, Syria and countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
