The boats, chartered by Doctors Without Borders and SOS Humanity, had rescued 509 people in international waters.
The two ships had to travel from Sicily to the peninsula for 40 hours with rough seas for the Italian Government to assign them a port to dock.
Two humanitarian ships with 509 migrants rescued in the central Mediterranean area They arrived on the Italian shores this Sunday after sailing for more than a day in adverse weather conditions. The two vessels docked at the ports indicated by the transalpine authorities to disembark.
The Geo Barentsflexed by Doctors without bordersarrived at the port of Salerno, south of Naples, with 248 immigrants on board, after the evacuation of a mother who gave birth to a baby and a 14-year-old boy with severe abdominal pain.
Secondly, El Humanity 1, of the German organization SOS Humanity, entered the port of Bari, in southern Italy, with another 261 migrants saved at sea. Among them were 40 women, three pregnant and 93 minors, of whom 67 were traveling alone.
waiting port
Until Friday, the two humanitarian boats had been detained off the coast from the Italian island of Sicily waiting for them to be assigned a safe port to which to take these people, rescued days before in International waters.
Finally, the Italian authorities chose to grant them two ports -Salerno and Bari- which are in peninsular territorywhich forced the ships and the 509 rescued immigrants to sail for more than a day with bad sea
“We have been sailing for almost 40 hours at full speed and in adverse weather conditions, with very strong winds and waves up to three meters high. The journey was exhausting,” they said from Humanity 1.
The Italian Ministry of the Interior has explained that this choice of ports responds to the need to no longer saturate the network of reception centers in Sicily and that the port of arrival has been assigned quickly due to the imminence of a storm, unlike other times in which the response was delayed.
against the NGOs
In this way, Ministry sources maintain that the Government, of the ultraderequist Giorgia Meloni, has not backed down policy against NGOs who save immigrants at sea, whom he accuses of encourage the migratory flow from Africa with his mere presence.
In early November, two weeks after coming to power, Meloni and her vice president, Matthew Salvinibegan the fight against the NGOs, precisely against Geo Barents and Humanity 1to force a European debate and distribute the asylum seekers who arrived on its shores on the continent.
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with a decree they prohibited their access to Italian portsbut these boats disobeyed him and, once moored at the Catania pier, in southern Italy, they were imposed a selective landingallowing only vulnerable immigrants to come ashore.
In the end, he agreed full landing of both ships, but one of them, the Ocean Viking, chartered by the organization SOS Méditerranée, had to head to a French port for the rejection in Italianwhich earned Meloni a first crisis with Paris.