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The searches went on all night. Unsuccessfully. Lecco firefighters worked more than 12 hours to find an 11-year-old girl from the Gambia who drowned while bathing with her mother. It happened around 2 in the afternoon on the free beach of Palone, in front of the Ulisse Guzzi Park, in the municipality of Abbadia Lariana, on the Lecco branch of Lake Como. A very crowded beach in summer, treacherous because the seabed descends very fast and the currents are strong.
That something was wrong was immediately noticed from the beach. They saw the girl and her mother struggle first and then crawl faster and faster. Some swimmers jumped into the water. Among them the boy’s father, who managed to grab his wife by the arm and drag her to shore but could do nothing for his daughter. In those moments of emotion, the woman later told the carabinieri, she had also managed to take her daughter by the hand, before the current carried her out to sea.
The woman said she couldn’t swim. But after watching so many bathe, it seemed safe. Desperate the father who did not stop repeating to the rescuers: “Look for my daughter, look for my daughter …”. The family, originally from the Gambia, with four children, lives in Monza. About fifteen years ago his father arrived along with what would later become his wife. The trip to the lake was supposed to be a pleasant moment, a piece of vacation that ended in tragedy like so many other times, it happens too many times. Both because of the recklessness of bathers who face the lake too lightly, and because of the waters of Lake Como that in a few minutes can go from calm to rough, even very rough.
Once the alarm was raised, the deployment of the means to search for the boy was impressive. The carabineros cleared the beach, delimiting access to bathers with a red and white ribbon. A firefighting helicopter arrived from Malpensa airport.
While the group of divers from the Vigili arrived from Lecco with an inflatable boat. The partly muddy lake bottom, which greatly limits the visibility of rescuers, also makes searches difficult. For this reason, rescuers also used a small robot to search the seabed. The investigation will resume this morning, also extending to the northernmost stretch of the lake called della Punta. But the weather forecasts for today are very bad, with heavy rains throughout the day that could make searches even more difficult.
However, the lake, and this is what rescuers fear, could not rescue the body of the girl, who is officially still considered missing and for this reason her personal data is not given as a minor. On the beach of Palone, among the small crowd of those who witnessed the work of the Firefighters divers, there are those who remember: «If you don’t know the lake, you can’t trust it. Whoever jumps without knowing how to swim risks a lot. The depths sometimes also support bodies. Four years ago, a Romanian hiker on a speedboat drowned on the high seas. His body has never been found again.
