Italy’s coast guard coordinated the rescue of 4,400 migrants from boats in the Mediterranean in a single day on Saturday, officials said yesterday as three new rescue operations were launched.
Saturday’s total was thought to be the highest for a single day in recent years as calm conditions encouraged people smugglers to leave Libya with boats loaded with as many paying passengers on board as possible.
The coast guard said it had received distress calls from a total of 22 vessels, either inflatable dinghies or wooden former fishing boats — all of them dangerously overcrowded and many of them lacking basic safety equipment.
Photo: AP
Boats from the Italian coast guard, navy and customs police all took part in the rescue operation alongside Norway’s Siem Pilot and Ireland’s Niamh, ships serving with the EU’s Triton search and rescue mission.
There were no reports of migrants having died during Saturday’s operations or prior to the rescue boats arriving.
With military rescue assets at full stretch, the coast guard said that it had been obliged to ask merchant ships to go to the rescue of the boats that were in trouble yesterday.
The rescued migrants were to be deposited at southern Italian ports from later yesterday onward, and the new arrivals lift to more than 108,000 the number of asylum seekers and other migrants to have arrived in Italy this year.
The wave of new arrivals triggered increasingly virulent attacks on center-left Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi’s handling of the migration crisis.
“This must a joke. We are using our own forces to do the people smugglers’ business for them and ensure we are invaded,” Italian Senator Maurizio Gasparri of Silvio Berlusconi’s center-right Forza Italia party said.
Member of European Parliament Matteo Salvini called on the government to house the migrants on disused Italian oil rigs off Libya.
“Help them, rescue them and take care of them, but don’t let them land here,” the populist leader of the anti-immigration Northern League wrote on Facebook.
Police in Palermo, Sicily, on Saturday announced that they had arrested six Egyptian nationals on suspicion of people smuggling following the rescue of a stricken boat on Wednesday.
Testimony from the 432 migrants on board suggest the vessel had been packed with more than 10 times the number of people it was designed for, with many of the passengers, including a number of women and children, locked below decks.
They had each paid the traffickers 2,000 euros (US$2,200) for the passage from Egypt to Italy, according to statements given to police.
On board, the crew were reported to have demanded further payment to allow those locked in the hold to come up temporarily for air.
Humanitarian organizations say the surge in the number of people trying to reach EU countries is the result of conflicts or repression in Africa and the Middle East.
They have called on European governments to shoulder more of the burden of absorbing the wave of asylum seekers and to help create safer routes for them to reach Europe.
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