Coffins containing people who died in a migrant shipwreck, lie in state at Palasport in Crotone, Italy, February 28, 2023 (Photo by Gabriele Maricchiolo/NurPhoto via Getty Images) ROME (AP) - Wailing and other expressions of grief echoed through a sports complex in southern Italy as public viewing began Wednesday of the closed coffins holding the bodies of dozens of migrants who died in a shipwreck.Meanwhile, the search by air and sea to spot any of the many believed still to be missing continued for a fourth day.
Italian state TV and the LaPresse news agency said a child’s body was the latest of three corpses to be recovered, raising the confirmed death toll to 67.Emerging in the aftermath have been conflicting or not completely synchronized accounts by authorities of what was known about the vessel in the last hours of its voyage before the shipwreck.The migrants' wooden boat, crammed with passengers who paid smugglers for the voyage from Turkey, broke apart in rough water just off a beach in Calabria before dawn on Sunday.Eighty people survived the shipwreck.
According to survivor accounts, the boat had held 170 or more passengers when it set out from the Turkish port of Izmir a few days earlier.Coffins containing people who died in a migrant shipwreck, lie in state at Palasport in Crotone, Italy, February 28, 2023 (Photo by Gabriele Maricchiolo/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The coffins — brown ones for adults and white ones for children — were arranged in neat rows on the sports facility's wooden floor in the city of Crotone.