Shahida Raza, the Pakistani hockey player who collapsed in Italy

BarcelonaShahida Raza, a player on the Pakistan women’s hockey team, was 27 years old and had a dream: to find medical treatment for her son, who as an infant suffered a neurological injury that left half of his body paralyzed. As her sister Saadia has explained to the BBC, helping her 3-year-old boy is what pushed her to get into a herd with about 200 other people to cross the middle of the Mediterranean from Turkey to Italy. She traveled alone and planned to legally bring the child to Europe once she was able to obtain the papers. After three or four days of strenuous travel, they had almost succeeded. But, in the middle of a storm, on Sunday the engine of the precarious boat caught fire, the barge broke up and on Sunday his body appeared on a beach in Calabria, in southern Italy. It is one of the 68 bodies that the Italian authorities have been able to recover. There were 80 survivors who managed to reach the beach. The rest have been swallowed by the sea.

The player called her sister from the pasture. “She was very happy: she said that they had almost arrived and that she did not believe that she would finally be able to take the child to be treated soon”, she remembers. The family has yet to hear from the authorities and found out about the wreck through social media. Now they can only ask for the repatriation of the corpse. “We don’t want anything else, from anyone,” says the sister, still in a state of shock. He assures that the athlete was afraid of the sea.

Raza also played soccer for Balochistan United – where she was known by the nickname Chintoo – and although she was an international, she could not find a job with enough pay to pay for her son’s medical treatment.

She was remembered yesterday by Hajra Khan, player of the women’s soccer team of Pakistan: “Another teammate has died. Shahdida-Chintoo was very smart and explosive on and off the field. Thank you for assisting my first international goal. I would like my country to respect its athletes, its people! Rest in eternal peace, sister.”

Several voices have remembered the girl in Pakistan, including Aurat March, a well-known feminist activist, and the Pakistan Hockey Federation, with whom she had played six international matches in 2013.

Too many unanswered questions

As the days pass, the accounts of the survivors and the official bodies come together to understand how the disaster occurred. The barge was first spotted by a plane operated by Frontex, the European border surveillance agency, 75 kilometers off the coast of Calabria.

Frontex has assured that the vessel was sailing without showing signs of danger, but that they alerted the authorities because the thermal cameras indicated that there could be people below deck. The Finance Guardwhich deals with coastal surveillance, sent two patrol boats to the area, but they returned to port due to bad weather conditions.

The disaster has put the spotlight on the battle that the Italian Prime Minister, the far-right Giorgia Meloni, is waging against the rescue of migrants in the Mediterranean. Under the new laws, ships like theOpen Arms they waste days traveling to distant ports, time they cannot devote to saving lives.