Resource photo of the Italian Coast Guard.
Coastguards and NGO boats save more than a thousand people in two days in Mediterranean waters
Italy is again this summer the Mediterranean country most affected by the landing of irregular migrants from the African coast. Over the weekend, hundreds of people arrived on the peninsula and many others were rescued by humanitarian ships. This problem, which is repeated every summer, is recorded this time in the middle of the September legislative campaign, in which the far-right party, opposed to accepting this human flow from the black continent and Asia, starts as the favorite.
So far this year, 34,000 migrants have arrived by sea in Italy, almost 10,000 more than in the same period in 2021 and an increase of 20,000 compared to 2020, according to the Rome Ministry of the Interior.
More than 600 people who tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea aboard a fishing boat were rescued on Saturday by a merchant ship and a coastguard when it was adrift off the coast of Calabria, at the southern tip of the Italian peninsula. The migrants were then taken to various ports on the island of Sicily. The authorities found on board the ship five bodies of dead migrants in unknown circumstances. “The Mediterranean is becoming the biggest graveyard for the desperate,” said the president of the Sicily region, Nello Musumeci.
overflow shelters
In the early hours of this Sunday, 522 people from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia arrived on the island of Lampedusa, mostly on board some fifteen boats from Tunisia and Libya. Transalpine media affirm that the reception center of the small island off the coast of Africa is overwhelmed. The Ansa agency states that it currently houses 1,200 people, when it has a capacity of between 250 and 300.
The migrants who manage to reach the shores of Lampedusa or Sicily travel in small, overloaded boats in deplorable sanitary conditions. Many times without life jackets, with little food and under a scorching sun.
The newspaper ‘La Sicilia’ specified that in the last landings in Lampedusa they saw boats with dozens, even hundreds of people on board, but also small tires.
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