by Our Foreign Desk

THE FUNERAL of 49 refugees who suffocated in the crowded and filthy hold of a people-trafficking boat will be held in Sicily, an official said yesterday.

Deputy Mayor Marco Consoli said the bodies are expected to arrive today in the port of Catania on the Italian island.

The victims apparently suffocated from inhaling exhaust fumes in the hold.

A Norwegian vessel participating in a European rescue-and-patrol mission in the Mediterranean was bringing the bodies and some 320 survivors from the boat towards Sicily.

The refugees were rescued yesterday off Libya by an Italian navy ship.

Commander Massimo Tozzi said when rescuers went aboard the boat, the bodies of refugees were “lying in water, fuel, human excrement” in the hold.

Cmdr Tozzi said the survivors included three children and 45 women, some of whom “were crying for their husbands (and) their children who died in the crossing.”

Survivors said places on the boat’s deck and life vests had gone to migrants who could afford to pay smugglers more.

Italian Admiral Pierpaolo Ribuffo, who co-ordinates the rescue operation, said the first rescuers approached the boat carefully in two rubber dinghies. Refugees often rush to one side of a vessel when help arrives, inadvertently capsizing it.

“We saw this boat filled up to unimaginable levels,” he said.

Elsewhere, refugees in two overcrowded and unseaworthy boats — mostly from Syria — landed on the Greek Island of Kos.