A 20-day-old baby was found dead on a migrant boat by the Italian coast guard early Thursday morning as the body was heading to help the boat near the island of Lampedusa.
The boy, who left with his 19-year-old mother from Côte d’Ivoire, was suffering from respiratory problems and the family was trying to reach Italy for treatment.
The doctor who examined the body found no signs of violence and concluded that death was probably caused by hypothermia in conjunction with the baby’s fragile condition.
This will be the second death from hypothermia in the last two days, since a woman who was traveling aboard a ship with rescued migrants in the Mediterranean Sea also died on Wednesday, after being rushed to a Lampedusa hospital.
The woman was traveling on one of the two boats carrying migrants that were a few kilometers from the port of the island located between Sicily and North Africa. Each ship had more than 40 people on board.
Boats with migrants traveling, many in precarious conditions and without any security, from North Africa to Europe have, in recent days, faced more problems getting help and docking in a safe port.
The new far-right government in Italy, headed by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, accuses the humanitarian organizations that rescue migrants at sea of encouraging the migratory phenomenon, for which it decided not to authorize or not respond to their requests to dock in Italian ports.
Several boats with hundreds of migrants remained for days off the Italian coast, despite the deteriorating health of the passengers.
The Italian Minister of Infrastructure and leader of the far-right La Liga party, Matteo Salvini, stressed on Monday that Europe “cannot leave Italy alone” and asked for help to resettle immigrants arriving in the country.
The position of the Italian Government is creating a source of tension with France, since the rescue ships that cannot dock in Italy end up going to other countries to land.
The French government ended up allowing the ship ‘Ocean Viking’, which has been in the Mediterranean for several days with hundreds of migrants on board, to set sail for France, but the Paris government accused Rome of not respecting the European commitments made.
“The ship is currently in Italian territorial waters. There are extremely clear European rules that have been accepted by Italians who are, in fact, the first beneficiaries of a European financial solidarity mechanism,” executive spokesman Oliver said on Wednesday. They will see.
At least 1,337 people have gone missing along central Mediterranean migration routes this year, according to the Missing Migrants Project of the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Source: TSF
