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Premier Matteo Renzi expressed
pride on Thursday after the Italian Navy successfully recovered
the wreck of a migrant boat that sank in April 2015 with over
700 people locked in the hold.
The incident was the worst in a long and ongoing series
of migrant-boat disasters in the southern Mediterranean.
The Navy recovered the boat from a depth of 370 meters in
a feat of engineering using using a complex pulley system.
The wreck is being taken in a refrigerated transport
module to Sicily, where forensic experts will try to identify
the dead.
"Thanks to the Navy. I'm proud to be Italian," Renzi said
on his Facebook page on Thursday.
"We work every day so that Europe is up to the values
that made it great.
"In April 2015 the traffickers led 700 people squashed at
sea and locked in the hold to their deaths.
"That event struck all people of good will.
"At the time Italy called for a extraordinary European
Council summit.
"And its from there that we started to change the
continent's migrant policy, one step at a time.
"The boat holds stories, faces, people, not just a number
of corpses.
"I instructed the Navy to recover the wreck to give a
burial to our brothers and sisters who otherwise would have
remained at the bottom of the sea forever.
"I did it because we Italians know the value of the word
civilization".
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