An 11-year-old girl from Sierra Leone was rescued overnight after three days at sea as the sole survivor of a shipwreck off Italy’s Lampedusa island.
A rescue charity organization, German charity CompassCollective, said crew on its vessel were en route to another emergency when they heard shouting from the water and picked up the girl around wearing a life jacket and hanging on to a pair of tyre tubes.
She told them she had set off from the Tunisian city of Sfax in a metal boat carrying 45 people that sank in a storm.
Charity crew took care of the girl and took her to Lampedusa which is closer to North Africa than the rest of Italy and is often a first landing point for migrants.