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.
BACK IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD: The planned transit by the ‘Baden-Wuerttemberg’ and the ‘Frankfurt am Main’ would be the German Navy’s first passage since 2002 Two German warships are set to pass through the Taiwan Strait in the middle of this month, becoming the first German naval vessels to do so in 22 years, Der Spiegel reported on Saturday. Reuters last month reported that the warships, the frigate Baden-Wuerttemberg and the replenishment ship Frankfurt am Main, were awaiting orders from Berlin to sail the Strait, prompting a rebuke to Germany from Beijing. Der Spiegel cited unspecified sources as saying Beijing would not be formally notified of the German ships’ passage to emphasize that Berlin views the trip as normal. The German Federal Ministry of Defense declined to comment. While
‘UPHOLDING PEACE’: Taiwan’s foreign minister thanked the US Congress for using a ‘creative and effective way’ to deter Chinese military aggression toward the nation The US House of Representatives on Monday passed the Taiwan Conflict Deterrence Act, aimed at deterring Chinese aggression toward Taiwan by threatening to publish information about Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials’ “illicit” financial assets if Beijing were to attack. The act would also “restrict financial services for certain immediate family of such officials,” the text of the legislation says. The bill was introduced in January last year by US representatives French Hill and Brad Sherman. After remarks from several members, it passed unanimously. “If China chooses to attack the free people of Taiwan, [the bill] requires the Treasury secretary to publish the illicit
A senior US military official yesterday warned his Chinese counterpart against Beijing’s “dangerous” moves in the South China Sea during the first talks of their kind between the commanders. Washington and Beijing remain at odds on issues from trade to the status of Taiwan and China’s increasingly assertive approach in disputed maritime regions, but they have sought to re-establish regular military-to-military talks in a bid to prevent flashpoint disputes from spinning out of control. Samuel Paparo, commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, and Wu Yanan (吳亞男), head of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Southern Theater Command, talked via videoconference. Paparo “underscored the importance
CHINA POLICY: At the seventh US-EU Dialogue on China, the two sides issued strong support for Taiwan and condemned China’s actions in the South China Sea The US and EU issued a joint statement on Wednesday supporting Taiwan’s international participation, notably omitting the “one China” policy in a departure from previous similar statements, following high-level talks on China and the Indo-Pacific region. The statement also urged China to show restraint in the Taiwan Strait. US Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell and European External Action Service Secretary-General Stefano Sannino cochaired the seventh US-EU Dialogue on China and the sixth US-EU Indo-Pacific Consultations from Monday to Tuesday. Since the Indo-Pacific consultations were launched in 2021, references to the “one China” policy have appeared in every statement apart from the
RSS