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The stories behind Europe’s unmarked migrant graves | News
Alhassane Bangoura was born on a rickety, overfull boat, travelling from Morocco to Lanzarote, in the Canary Islands. His mother was making the perilous journey that so many others have attempted, with the goal of reaching the safety of Europe and a new life. She would survive but her baby boy would not. He died on the boat during the crossing.
As Ashifa Kassam tells Nosheen Iqbal, what happened next is indicative of how the European Union often treats people who risk everything to reach its shores – and those who never make it. Alhassane Bangoura was buried in an unmarked grave, one of more than a thousand across Europe – the largest number of unnamed gravestones since the second world war.
Working with forensic scientists from the International Committee of the Red Cross and other researchers, NGOs and pathologists, the Guardian and a consortium of reporters have pieced together for the first time the number of migrants and refugees who died in the past decade along the EU’s borders whose names remain unknown. At least 2,162 bodies have still not been identified. Read the whole investigation here.
Photograph: Daphne Tolis/The Guardian
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