On a desperate voyage to Sicily, Francis Ipisbhe lost his wife. Now, a year on, he has finally been able to mark her grave

Just over a week ago, Francis Ipisbhe knelt on the dusty earth, looked up to the clouds, his weary arms high above his head, and thanked God. For a year, he had been searching for his missing wife, Mary. Now he had found her. Mary’s body was known to be among hundreds of unmarked migrants’ graves in a cemetery in Palermo, the capital of Sicily. All had lost their lives in the Mediterranean while trying to reach Europe.

As sea crossings increase and fears of another summer of drownings are renewed, thousands of Marys lie in unmarked graves across Italy, Greece and Turkey, while thousands of relatives, like Francis, search for them in desperation.

The Ipisbhes left Lagos, Nigeria, in early 2017. They crossed the Sahara and clung to each other on a crowded rubber dinghy as it departed from the shores of Tripoli in the direction of Italy. After a few hours at sea, the raft began to deflate, but its occupants saw a rescue boat on the horizon and tearfully rejoiced. Then something went terribly wrong.

With tears streaming down his face, Francis, 46, relived the harrowing moments of the tragic night when he lost Mary for ever. “She was hanging on to my shoulders when I tried to fasten a rope to the bow of the boat,” he said. “Behind me, dozens of people were pushing to reach the rescue boat first. When I’d managed to tighten the rope, I no longer felt Mary’s arms around my neck.”

The crowd surged forward, and Mary – who was 27 years old and four months pregnant – fell into the sea. Francis dived into the water, but when he brought her back to the surface she had already stopped breathing.

“I tried, God knows how hard I tried to save her,’’ he says. The date was 25 May 2017, and the seven most powerful world leaders had just arrived in Taormina, on Sicily’s east coast, for the G7 summit, so the Italian authorities banned migrant vessels from docking in local ports. Francis’s group had to wait for three days off the south-eastern port of Augusta. “I wept for three days as I kept vigil over Mary’s dead body,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A rescue in the Mediterranean last year. Photograph: Chris McGrath/Getty

When Ipisbhe finally landed in Augusta, he asked the local police what would happen to his wife’s body. “They said: ‘We’ll handle it. We’ll let you know where she’s buried.’

“I wanted to be reassured that they would give her a proper burial, that she would rest in peace. But they didn’t give me time. I was devastated when I left. I did not want to leave her there.”

The following day, he was transferred to a centre for asylum seekers in Valle d’Aosta near the French border, more than 600 miles from Sicily.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IoM), more than 3,000 migrants have perished in the Mediterranean since the start of 2017. The UN has estimated such deaths at over 15,000 since 2013. Only one in 10 bodies is recovered by the authorities. The rest remain at sea.

Cemeteries in Sicily now hold the remains of over 2,300 migrants who died trying to reach Europe. Many tombstones are given only an identification number and often there is no reference to the date of death.

Giorgia Mirto, a consultant for the International Red Cross, is one of the founding members of the Mediterranean Missing project, which since 2011 has been committed to putting a name to every person lost at sea. Day after day, she collects information from police stations and visits thousands of unnamed graves in cemeteries across southern Italy. In many regions, there is no death certificate corresponding to a body. For Mirto this is a vocation: her grandfather was kidnapped by the mafia in 1970 and his body was never found.

“The problem is that countries like Italy and Greece do not have the necessary means to identify every body that is found at sea,” she says. “And the standard procedures, requiring the collection of DNA samples, are hardly followed. With each shipwreck, the district attorney’s office investigates those responsible for the disaster. Identifying dead bodies is not in their interest.”

Referring to 800 victims that had been found in a vessel 375 metres beneath the sea in 2015, the district attorney of Catania, Giovanni Salvi, told reporters: “Those bodies aren’t needed for the investigation … The government can handle it if it wants to, but we can’t cover the costs of recovering the bodies.”

Thousands of parents and siblings are living with the hope that they may one day find their children, brothers and sisters. Others would welcome the chance to mourn their loved ones at a gravestone.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Giorgia Mirto: ‘Identifying dead bodies is not in the authorities’ interests.’ Photograph: Vincenzo Allotta/Maghweb

When Ipisbhe arrived in Augusta, no one asked him to identify Mary’s body. Upon being sent to northern Italy, he was given no further information on his wife – until last March.

In March this year, in Palermo, the Human Rights Youth Organisation (HRYO) had arranged a conference called Anatomy of a Shipwreck. “We wanted to focus attention on the migrants who had disappeared in the Mediterranean,” says Marco Farina, one of the organisers of the event. “After the debate, a friend who had attended the conference told me the story of a Nigerian man living in Aosta who had been searching for his wife for almost a year. His name was Francis, Francis Ipisbhe.”

That week, Farina contacted Dr Antonietta Lanzarone, a coroner in Palermo, to inquire about a woman whose body had arrived in Augusta the previous May. Fortunately, Lanzarone was the same doctor who had processed Mary’s body, as well as those of seven other migrants who had died during the same rescue operation. Ipisbhe was told there was a chance that his wife’s grave could be located.

Palermo Palermo

He immediately set out for Sicily, leaving Aosta by train for a journey that would last almost 20 hours. In Palermo, a police officer placed seven photographs on the desk in front of him: they were images of decomposing cadavers, whether men or women was hard to tell. Francis scrutinised them, concentrating on every scrap of skin left on the bodies. Then he exclaimed: “Number three! Mary is number three!”

“I recognised her from her braids,” he recalls. “I used to do them for her, as I did the day before we left Libya.”

Body number three lay in the Rotoli cemetery in Palermo. Waste paper and rubbish were strewn across the area, littering the graves of hundreds of migrants. Ipisbhe cleaned up the area, framed Mary’s tomb with stones and then constructed a crucifix out of twigs. He attached a piece of paper to the crucifix that read “Mary Ipisbhe”. Then he knelt at her grave and prayed for the entire morning.

The following day, he returned to Aosta by train, but he plans to move to Palermo as soon as possible. Despite the pain, he says this is above all a love story. “I still love her,” he says. “I want to be close to Mary.”