Italy’s painstaking bid to identify shipwrecked migrants
The shy children from a dog-eared photograph found in the pocket of a migrant drowned off Italy may never know what happened to the man who might have been their father. Putting names to those who die while crossing the Mediterranean to Europe is a huge challenge for forensic scientists, with clues sometimes limited to no more than a scar or a solitary tatoo. Cristina Cattaneo and her team pull on sanitary gloves, robes and masks and transfer from refrigerated lorry to autopsy table the latest bodies to be recovered from an April shipwreck in which 800 people are believed to have died.
