Mira Akram Al Jawabrah and Mohamed Masalmeh

Mahmoud Maria: Relatives were initially told Mira, her parents and three younger siblings — Yousef, Mahmoud and Maria — had drowned as they were making their way from Libya to Italy at that time, said Masalmeh, a friend of the girl father and uncle, according to Hamilton Spectator. The boat had more than 500 refugees aboard when it sank in the Mediterranean, he said. Mohamed Masalmeh, a cousin of the dark-haired girl, says he sure the photo shows Mira Akram Al Jawabrah after she was rescued from a boat that overturned off the coast of Italy in August 2014, when the girl was three years old. About 200 disappeared. "We completely lost contact with them, and we didn't know if they were alive or not," he said in an interview Wednesday. "We assumed that everybody was dead." However, relatives later spotted the girl picture among a series of photos on a Syrian news website showing survivors from the capsizing, he said. "They had hope that she was still alive, and the picture proved that she was still alive," he said. A longtime resident of Halifax, Masalmeh said he not sure who took the photo, and he says subsequent requests for information from the Red Cross, the Italian government and police have yielded no useful information. In the photo, the girl is holding at white card with the number 268 on it. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.