On the coastline of southern Italy, a small group gathered at the water’s edge.

They could not go any further into the Ionian Sea although they clearly wished they could.

“Is Europe worth all this trouble, I swear to God it’s not,” says a man called Setar.

“Why put your wife and children through this?”

The shock is real, the feelings raw after the deaths of 60 or more migrants in the central Mediterranean in this incident alone.

The Italian coastguard says 20 bodies have been recovered off the coast of Calabria after a sailboat packed with migrants capsized and sank.

Some 76 people were believed to be on board, and only 11 survived. The rest are missing and feared dead.

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Passengers clung to the remains of the semi-submerged craft some 120 miles from the Italian coast but assistance – in the form of the coastguard – took four days to arrive.

Only 11 managed to survive the ordeal.

Smugglers organised the journey from a place near Bodrum in Turkey, using a well-used migration seaway through the Mediterranean.

More than 70 paid for a spot in the vessel, with the majority formed by Kurds from Iran and Iraq.

Some passengers told their relatives that they would travelling “like VIPs”, but that was just a lie spun by the smugglers.

There were few provisions on board.

We found a woman called Mitra Ghasem Karimi, sitting under the hull of an old boat in the Italian port of Roccella Ionica.

It was clear that Ms Karimi had been crying.

Originally from Iran, she now lives in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. She told me that her brother Pourya, 41, and sister Somma, 36, had boarded that craft.

She said: “There was no water, there was no food in the boat – but to the families and the people who got in that damn boat, (the smugglers) said yes, there is water, food.

“My brother and sister had life jackets, but they would not let them take them with them. Why?”

Mitra and her husband said they wanted to hire a helicopter so they could fly over the remains of the vessel. I asked them what they were expecting to see.

She replied: “Maybe some bodies, maybe I can find the body of my own brother and sister, to find the bodies and take them to my mum, so my mum can mourn.”

Mitra had stowed her brother and sister’s Iranian passports securely in her bag, and she burst into tears as she took them out to show me.

“They just wanted a better life, the people who got into that boat. Why can’t they have that life in their country, their damn country?” she said.

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It took the best part of a day to hire a helicopter – along with 6,000 Euros in cash – but Mitra did not find the bodies of her brother and sister.

Her siblings remain lost at sea.

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But she has recordings of their voices stored on phone and she has hovered above the waters where they lost their lives.

It may have brought her a small measure of peace.

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