Search Results for 'spring' | Gianni Cipriano Photography

$SIRACUSA, ITALY - 21 SEPTEMBER 2016: Angelo Milazzo (57), a local policeman in Siracusa formerly working in the Interagency Task Force for Combating Illegal Migration (or G.I.C.I.C., by its Italian acronym), shuffles through the files of the August 24th 2014 shipwreck for which he was assigned to identify 24 victims, in his office here in the Court House of Siracusa, Italy, on September 21st 2016.<br /> <br /> On August 24th 2014, a boat carrying more than 400 migrants, departed from the coasts of Libya in the attempt to reach Italy, capsized in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. Rescuers of the Italian Navy saved 352 people, and recovered 24 lifeless bodies.<br /> <br /> Milazzo asked the public prosecutor for permission to open a Facebook profile under the name “SIRIA-GICIC.” Relying on the descriptions of the bodies contained in the forensic reports, the photos taken on board the rescue ships and during the examinations, and on the collection of personal items that were found along with the corpses, he would work backwards from these slivers to try to arrive at the living people who once animated the now anonymous cadavers. Facebook, he hoped, would help him get the information he needed from the families of the missing to identify the bodies and allow him to inform their relatives of the death.<br /> <br /> The SIRIA-GICIC profile page on Facebook was created on October 10th, 2014, nearly two months after the shipwreck. At the time, 18 of the 24 bodies were still unidentified. Within a few months, Angelo Milazzo was able to identify all 24 bodies.<br /> <br /> Following the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, including Gaddafi’s death and Libya’s plunge towards chaos, clandestine crossings skyrocketed, as did the number of people drowning. In 2014 over 170,000 arrived in Italy and since then more than 10,000 perished in the Mediterranean sea.<br /> <br /> Only a fraction of these bodies have ever been recovered, and, of the ones that have, the majority remain unidentified. In Sicily alone there are mo$

$SIRACUSA, ITALY - 8 NOVEMBER 2016: The new gravestone of Musaab Shabani, a victim of the August 24th 2014 shipwreck, is seen here after being freshly cut, engraved and painted here at the Gibilisco marble-worker's workshop in Siracusa, Italy, on November 8th 2016. It will replace the anonymous gravestone marked with the number "9" in the cemetery of Sortino.<br /> <br /> Musaab Shabani was buried in the cemetery of Sortino, marked by a gravestone with the number nine because at the time he hadn't been identified yet. He was later identified by his brother Abd thanks to the efforts of policeman Angelo Milazzo. Since then, Abd has arranged to have a gravestone made bearing his brother’s name and date and place of birth as well as a religious inscription in Arabic, bringing a final bit of closure to this tragic chapter. <br /> <br /> On August 24th 2014, a boat carrying more than 400 migrants, departed from the coasts of Libya in the attempt to reach Italy, capsized in international waters in the Mediterranean Sea. Rescuers of the Italian Navy saved 352 people, and recovered 24 lifeless bodies.<br /> <br /> Following the events of the Arab Spring in 2011, including Gaddafi’s death and Libya’s plunge towards chaos, clandestine crossings skyrocketed, as did the number of people drowning. In 2014 over 170,000 arrived in Italy and since then more than 10,000 perished in the Mediterranean sea.<br /> <br /> Only a fraction of these bodies have ever been recovered, and, of the ones that have, the majority remain unidentified. In Sicily alone there are more than 1,500 graves of anonymous refugees and migrants–people from Syria and other war torn countries–who have drowned in shipwrecks at sea.<br /> <br /> Despite the decades long persistence of the problem, Italy has yet to develop a comprehensive approach to handling the bodies of shipwreck victims. Many pieces of a functional body identification system are in place, but its overall effectiveness is crippled by a lack of coordination between the various local agencies invol$