Italy has assigned the Ocean Viking, an SOS Méditerranée humanitarian ship, a safe port to disembark the 113 people rescued in the Mediterranean during the ship’s first operation since it docked in France in November, the NGO announced Tuesday.
113 people rescued, including around thirty minors
The ship was headed for the north-east Italian port of Ravenna, designated by Italian authorities as a safe port, the NGO said in a statement, deploring the “long four days of navigation” required to get there. The migrants on board the ship were rescued overnight from Monday to Tuesday in international waters under the Malta search and rescue area, near the Libyan area, the NGO said.
“As we head north, we fear that other people in danger at sea cannot be rescued,” SOS Méditerranée worried, although “(relieved) by the survivors on board” the Ocean Viking.
Among the rescued migrants, “23 women, some of them pregnant, about thirty unaccompanied minors and three babies, the youngest of whom is only three weeks old,” said SOS Méditerranée, whose headquarters are in Marseille, in the southwest. east of France. They were in “an overloaded black dinghy, in total darkness”, still according to SOS Méditerranée.
At the center of a Franco-Italian controversy
In mid-November, the Ocean Viking had landed in Toulon, in southeastern France, with 230 migrants rescued between Libya and Italy, after three weeks of wandering in search of a safe port and a diplomatic standoff between Paris and Rome. . The French government had agreed to welcome the ship “in an exceptional way” after Italy’s refusal, which caused diplomatic tensions between the two countries.
Placed in a closed “waiting room”, most of the survivors had been released by court order, because they were unaccompanied minors or because they had been admitted to France under asylum.
Since the beginning of the year, 1,998 migrants have gone missing in the Mediterranean, including 1,369 in the central Mediterranean, the world’s most dangerous migration route, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Every year, thousands of people fleeing conflict or poverty try to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean from Libya, whose coasts are 300 km from Italy.
Source: BFM TV
