The Pilgrim's Progress

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August was not the first time I'd wondered about Abdi Salan. Every news report from Lampedusa over the past three years had been an instant reminder of the young Somali who'd landed in 2003 on that tiny Italian island — a dusty, sun-drenched slab of terrain south of Sicily that's among the prime European destinations for [an error occurred while processing this directive] illegal-immigrant traffickers. But the news report this August recorded the deaths of more than 60 would-be immigrants off Lampedusa's shores in two successive incidents — a tragedy almost on the scale of Abdi Salan's landfall.

Abdi Salan Mohammed Hassan was one of just 15 survivors among 85 African refugees — almost all Somalia natives — to be rescued on Oct. 19, 2003, after two weeks of drifting in the open sea. It was the worst episode linked to Lampedusa in recent memory, and a remarkable public outpouring followed, including a funeral for the 13 recovered bodies held by the mayor of Rome at the capital's city hall.

Wanting to learn how and why people end up on such a perilous journey, Time went searching for those who'd made it across the Strait of Sicily. That was what brought us to Abdi Salan's bedside in the Palermo Civic Hospital, where he and other survivors had been helicoptered from Lampedusa after their rescue by Italian police. Ten days later, over the course of five hours and with the help of a Somalian translator, Abdi Salan recounted every step of his eight-month journey from his home in war-torn Mogadishu across the Sahara to Libya. There, he boarded a smuggler's boat for what was supposed to be a 48-hour, 275-km final sprint to a better life. Early on the second day, the 12-m fishing boat's engine suddenly gave out. By the tenth day of drifting, he said, "I saw people dying all around me. I was just waiting to die, too."

Two weeks after Time published a seven-page story on his ordeal, Abdi Salan called to thank me, in a halting mix of Italian and English, for the copy of the magazine I'd sent. That was the last contact we'd had. But in the meantime, the flow of immigrants to Lampedusa has only increased — as has debate across Europe about how to control the tide of illegal human trafficking. So far this year, 17,000 people have arrived on Lampedusa, up from 14,000 in 2003. The European Commission estimates that 3,000 people have died this year in waters off the Italian and Spanish coasts.