About 500 migrants traveling on a fishing boat were rescued and disembarked in ports in Sicily, southern Italy, in recent hours in an operation coordinated by the Italian Coast Guard.
According to the company, the 500 rescued migrants arrived between the afternoon and evening of Friday at the ports of Augusta and Catania, in Sicily, who were on a small fishing boat off the coast of Siracusa and were distributed to boats of the coast guard and also FRONTEX , the European border control apparatus.
In contrast, the Italian Coast Guard said another ship, belonging to the non-governmental organization “Mv Humanity 1”, which has rescued 69 migrants on board and has been cleared to reach Ravenna (centre) is expected to arrive at 600 nautical miles (about 1,100 kilometres) from the rescue site, following the government’s migration law that moves humanitarian ships away from rescue zones, guaranteeing distant ports.
Currently, due to the bad weather, large numbers of people have not arrived on the island of Lampedusa, which welcomes about 500 migrants at the local identification center, where about 3,000 people have already been.
Valerio Valenti, the new extraordinary commissioner appointed by the government of Giorgia Meloni to manage the state of emergency declared by the executive, has already visited the small Sicilian island, a few kilometers from the North African coast, as the first action of the mandate.
“We must ensure that migrants arriving in Lampedusa can be transferred to the mainland as quickly as possible,” he said.
According to the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of the Interior, 33,480 migrants reached the Italian coast, almost four times more than in the same period last year (8,432).
Source: DN
