Her name was Lilia, she was Algerian and she was only eight months old when she drowned in the waters of the Mediterranean. Her parents decided to embark with her on a shepherd to look for a better future in Europe. The precarious boat in which Lilia, her parents and thirteen other migrants were traveling was wrecked near the Balearic Islands, ten kilometers off the coast of Dénia (Marina Alta) last spring, on March 23. The small body of the girl, already in a very bad state, appeared a week ago on the beach of Roda de Berà (Tarragonès).
The Civil Guard yesterday confirmed the identity of the human remains found on the beach by one of the operators of the cleaning service in the early hours of the morning of Tuesday 11 July. It was the main hypothesis being studied, pointed out by the mayor of Roda de Berà himself, Pere Virgili, a few hours after the sad discovery.
Little Lilia started the journey from Algeria on March 21 with her parents. He did it, as is usual in these cases, in a shepherd that exceeded its capacity, with a total of 16 people on board. None of them have survived. The International Center for the Identification of Missing Migrants (Cipimd) has assured La Vanguardia that the body found on the Tarragona coast is that of Lilia.
When the news of the discovery of the child’s body became public, on July 11, the NGO in charge of searching for, finding and identifying migrants at the request of families or institutions contacted the Civil Guard to collaborate with the research “We have no record of the disappearance of other people with so few months of life during those days. It had to be Lilia”, added the Cipimd to this newspaper.
The organization maintains that the shipwreck took place long before the date indicated by the police force in its statement, April 6, since the first two corpses appeared on the Alicante coast tangled in fishing nets, two days later of the clandestine exit from one of Cherchell’s beaches. This is a common starting point for migration routes from Africa. Migrants risk their lives – having previously paid thousands of euros – with the dream of reaching the Peninsula and setting foot on European territory. The destination this time was Ibiza, although they never set foot on land.
Lilia’s DNA samples match those of a woman whose body was found at the beginning of April precisely on the coast of the Balearic island, as determined by the criminalistics service of the Civil Guard thanks to in the database of genetic profiles. Days later, corpses also appeared in Cartagena (1) and again in Alicante (8), in addition to the body of Roda de Berà.
Three of the sixteen people who went to the same pasture on the beaches of Cherchell have not yet been found. Except for the mother and Lilia, they were all men, mostly Algerians. Four of them were sub-Saharan.
Originally from Tipaza, the mother has already been able to be buried in her village. The family is waiting for the repatriation of the bodies of the child and the father, also recovered from the sea, so that they can be buried in the same town.
