Italy aims to resume search for bodies in shipwreck tragedy

LAMPEDUSA: Italian emergency services hoped to resume the search for bodies Saturday despite rough seas after the worst ever Mediterranean refugee tragedy, in which 111 African asylum-seekers are confirmed dead and around 200 more are still missing.

With the search for bodies off the island of Lampedusa suspended Friday due to bad weather, an emotional Pope Francis said it was "a day of tears" in a "savage world" that ignored refugees.

The government asked Europe to help stem the influx of migrants, as the country mourned the dead.

Islanders in the tiny fishing community held a mass and a silent torch-lit procession, as flags across Italy flew at half mast Friday and schools marked a minute of silence.

Emergency services on the remote island -- Italy's southernmost point -- said they had recovered 111 bodies so far and rescued 155 survivors from a boat with an estimated 450 to 500 people on board.

Rescuers said strong currents around the island may have swept other bodies further out to sea but they were no longer able to leave the port because of strong winds and two-metre (seven-foot) waves.

"There is horror down there. Dozens of corpses, maybe hundreds," Rocco Canell, who runs a local diving school and went down before the search was halted, told the Italian news agency ANSA.

"They are all on top of another, piled up, wedged. The lucky ones are those who died first," he said after descending to the ghostly wreck, which lies on the seabed at a depth of around 40 metres.

The migrants, almost all Eritreans, departed from the Libyan port of Misrata and stopped to pick up more people in Zuwara, also in Libya.

They told rescuers they set fire to a blanket on board just off Lampedusa to signal to coast guards after their boat began taking on water.

The fire quickly spread on the 20-metre (66-foot) vessel, which capsized and sank in the early hours of Thursday morning just a few hundred metres from Lampedusa, as its terrified passengers jumped into waters covered in a slick of spilled fuel.

The boat's Tunisian skipper, already arrested in Italy in April for people trafficking and deported back to Tunisia, has been detained.