The bodies of eight migrants, including a pregnant woman, have been found aboard a ship rescued in the Mediterranean by the Italian coast guard, Filippo Mannino, mayor of the island of Lampedusa, announced Friday.
The Coast Guard recovered on Thursday night “eight bodies, five men and three women, one of whom was pregnant. There are 42 survivors, including two pregnant women,” Filippo Mannino said.
“I have lost count of the dead. I have been mayor for six months and I have already received at least 40 deaths. This is not normal, almost every week we recover corpses, ”he lamented.
“Europe must do something”
The island of Lampedusa is a 20 km² rock located about a hundred kilometers east of the Tunisian coast, in the heart of the Mediterranean and represents the first gateway to Europe for immigrants arriving from North Africa.
Italy has been a major gateway for seaborne immigration from Africa to Europe for years, with a record 180,000 arrivals in 2016.
In 2022 some 105,000 immigrants arrived in Italy and close to 5,000 since the beginning of the year, a figure much higher than that of the same period of the two previous years, indicates the website of the Ministry of the Interior.
The issue of immigration and the management of the flow of migrants will be on the agenda of the next extraordinary summit of the European Union scheduled for February 9 and 10.
“The situation is becoming really dramatic. Europe must do something, the government must do something”, stressed the mayor of Lampedusa.
Italy, led since October by the right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni, fights by all means against the arrival of immigrants and has insisted on putting this issue on the agenda of the summit to seek greater support from other EU countries.
delay arrivals
Rome hopes in particular to obtain an automatic redistribution of immigrants arriving on its territory, an idea that is met with strong resistance from many EU countries.
In an attempt to at least curb arrivals, the government adopted a new restrictive law in early January on the activities of NGOs that rescue migrants at sea.
Therefore, the ships of these NGOs must inform the Italian authorities as soon as they have rescued a ship and the latter will decide the port where the survivors and rescuers should dock.
Often it is a distant port from the place of the rescue operation.
In this way, NGOs cannot rescue several vessels in several operations and waste a lot of time going to assigned ports and returning to the high seas.
This law has also been criticized by various bodies of the Council of Europe.
Source: BFM TV
