Divers entering the wreckage of a sunken boat that carried refugees from Africa to Italy reporting finding 38 bodies in the hull that were “so entwined one with the other” that they’ve had difficulty bringing the remains to the surface.

The discovery of the bodies has raised the death toll from the accident to 232 people.

The boat caught fire and sank near the Sicilian island of Lampedusa carried more than 500 refugees from Somalia and Eritrea.

“Some [bodies] we have found with their arms outstretched. We try not to notice this kind of thing too much, otherwise the task is too difficult,” police diver Riccardo Nobile told the BBC. “We can see a woman’s hair floating out of a broken porthole. But we haven’t been able to get to her.”

The United Nations says that 3,000 people try to flee Eritrea every month.