ROME -- The Italian navy has raised from the Mediterranean seafloor the migrant boat that sank off Sicily last year with hundreds of people aboard.
The navy said it had raised the boat from a depth of 1,214 feet using a complicated pulley system. The wreckage is being kept in a refrigerated transport module for the trip back to port in Sicily, where forensic experts will begin trying to identify the dead.
A news conference to explain details of the operation is scheduled for today, the navy said.
The April 18, 2015, wreck remains one of the deadliest on record in the migrant crisis, though the actual number of drownings will never be known. On that night, the boat carrying 700 to 800 people, most of them African, capsized as a civilian freighter approached.
Most passengers were locked below decks; only 28 survived.
The sinking sparked renewed calls for action in European countries, which agreed to send in European Union naval reinforcements to cast a wider safety net for the waves of migrants leaving Libya on smugglers' boats.
Although tens of thousands of migrants have been rescued, thousands of others have drowned. During a three-day period last month, an estimated 700 migrants died, including those aboard an overcrowded fishing boat.
Humanitarian organizations and investigating authorities typically rely on survivors' accounts to piece together how many people have been killed when a boat capsizes, relying on overlapping accounts to try to establish a level of veracity.
The United Nations refugee agency estimates that since April 19, 2015, 4,927 people have died making the sea crossing to Europe.
Most of the migrant boats that sink are never recovered, and the dead are never identified. But after the 2015 disaster, Italy pledged to find the wreckage, hoping that the exercise will help create a European network to identify victims by cross-checking data.
The navy began the complicated recovery operation in the spring. Navy divers in previous months already had found 169 bodies near the wreckage about 85 miles off Libya's coast.
Italy's southern islands are the main destinations for smuggling boats setting off from the shores of Libya and packed with people seeking jobs and safety in Europe.
As part of Europe's crackdown on smugglers, police said a 36-hour operation spread over several European and Balkan countries and resulted in 39 arrests and the discovery of 580 migrants.
Serbian police said Wednesday that they had arrested five suspects and found 170 migrants. They said the joint action included police from Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia, Germany, Hungary, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, Switzerland and Europol.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press.
A Section on 06/30/2016