ROME — The Italian navy has raised from the sea floor the migrant ship that sank off Sicily last year with an estimated 700-800 people aboard in one of the worst known tragedies of the Mediterranean migrant crisis.

The navy said it had successfully recovered the boat from a depth of 1,200 feet using a complicated pulley system fixed to a support frame that attached onto the shipwreck. Now resurfaced, the wreck 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.

The April 18, 2015, wreck remains one of the deadliest on record, though the real number of drownings will never be known.

On that night, the boat carrying between 700 and 800 migrants, most of them African, capsized as a civilian freighter approached.

Most passengers were locked below decks; only 28 survived.

The sinking sparked renewed outrage and soul-searching in European capitals, which agreed to send in reinforcements to cast a wider safety net to try to rescue the waves of migrants leaving Libya on smugglers’ boats.

Most of the migrant boats that sink are never recovered.

Associated Press