Italian authorities are investigating after the bodies of 26 teenaged girls were recovered in the Mediterranean Sea on Sunday.
The girls, aged 14-18, are believed to have been from Nigeria, who followed a dangerous route from Libya to Europe over the weekend, according to CNN.
Twenty-three of the dead teenagers were found on a rubber dinghy that sank off Libya two days ago, a spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, said.
The other three died in a separate shipwreck.
The bodies were found by a Spanish vessel, which lowered a “seemingly endless line of black plastic body bags” onto a port in southern Italy, according to Agence France-Presse. The bodies were then placed in coffins and loaded onto waiting hearses, AFP reported.
There is no immediate explanation for why all the dead were teenaged girls, but Italian police will be carrying out autopsies on the bodies Tuesday to determine if they were tortured or sexually abused, CNN reported.
Investigators said they will be looking for signs of violence.
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“They were on a dinghy that was also carrying men,” an investigator told Italian media in response to fears the doomed vessel may have been carrying victims destined for sex trade work.
“The sex trafficking routes are different. Loading women onto a boat is too risky, the traffickers would not do it as they could lose all their ‘goods’ — as they describe them — in one fell swoop.”
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There were three other rescue operations carried out in the Mediterranean over the weekend. In total, 400 migrants were brought aboard the Spanish vessel Cantabria.
The number of migrants arriving in Italy so far this year is 30 per cent lower than last year — 111,716 through Friday compared to nearly 160,000 in the same period of 2016, according to Interior Ministry figures.
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Despite the drop, traffickers are still sending boats of migrants into the Mediterranean. The International Organization for Migration said Friday that more than 2,560 migrants had been rescued over four days.
In all, 2,839 people have died while attempting the crossing so far this year, it said.
— With files from the Associated Press and AFP
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