Heart! A thousand decommissioned bodies have been recovered from the sea in one of Europe's worst human trafficking cases

In the early hours of the morning, permira, a volunteer doctor, was driven by the Italian Coast Guard from Sicily to the sea east of Tripoli, where the night was dark and dead.

Heart! A thousand decommissioned bodies have been recovered from the sea in one of Europe's worst human trafficking cases

It was not until the little speedboat that had taken him farther out to sea that he saw what was rising and falling on the surface of the sea -- human beings, human remains to be exact, in front of a sea of corpses.

"Too many. They move up and down with the waves."

Heart! A thousand decommissioned bodies have been recovered from the sea in one of Europe's worst human trafficking cases

Pomella and his colleagues kept pulling the floating bodies onto the boat until he heard a shout. With the help of a small lamp, he finds one survivor among more than 200 floating corpses and pulls him onto the boat.

A few minutes later, Pomella's boat passed in front of a man whose eyes were open and still, who thought he was dead until his hand was taken.

Heart! A thousand decommissioned bodies have been recovered from the sea in one of Europe's worst human trafficking cases

It was only in the early hours of the morning that Pomella and his colleagues brought the gruesome sea of bodies back to Sicily. He saved two people alive that day, and Pomella has always felt guilty ever since:

Are there any other survivors I just haven't found?

Heart! A thousand decommissioned bodies have been recovered from the sea in one of Europe's worst human trafficking cases

On April 18, 2015, 249 bodies were recovered from the wreckage of a sunken ship. When the sunken ship was found a year later on the ocean floor, the opening of the hatch was a shocking sight - layers upon layers of people, nearly 1,000 of them, trapped and suffocated to death in the hold.

Five years after the deadliest migrant disaster in the History of the Mediterranean, it's all but forgotten in Europe, but the people of Sicily are still trying to figure out the truth behind the tragedy.

From the British newspaper sister