The rescue ship “Ocean Viking” has rescued almost 270 migrants in five rescue operations in the Mediterranean since Thursday. Most of the rescued people were fetched from overcrowded wooden boats between Libya and Malta, as the French aid organization SOS Méditerrannée announced in Marseille last night. Many of them suffer from “severe exhaustion and dehydration” and “severe sunburn”.
According to the information, several minors, including unaccompanied minors, pregnant women and a three-week-old baby are among the 268 rescued on the “Ocean Viking”.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that 1,161 people have been killed or missing on the flight route across the Mediterranean since the beginning of the year, 918 of them in the central Mediterranean. This route from North Africa to Europe is considered the most dangerous migration route in the world. According to IOM estimates, there were a total of 2,048 dead and missing in the Mediterranean last year, 1,553 of them in the central Mediterranean alone.