More than 800 migrants arrived on the Italian island of Lampedusa (Sicily, south) in recent hours, in a new wave of 21 landings, after four days without boat arrivals due to bad weather conditions.
A total of 819 people have arrived in Lampedusa in the past 24 hours, where Maritime Captaincy and Coast Guard patrol boats are struggling to respond to calls for help from the numerous ships berthed close to the island.
The last four landings, involving 179 people, were recorded on Monday morning. On Sunday, 640 people arrived on this small island, which has become a symbol of immigration in Italy and is located just a few kilometers from the North African coast.
Arrivals in Lampedusa, which had been interrupted in recent days due to poor sea conditions, put the reception center, equipped to house about 400 migrants, in an emergency situation.
The center currently has 1,094 migrants following the arrival of more people.
The new arrivals, in groups of 30 to 50 people, include migrants from the Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Nigeria, Burkina Faso and also from Sudan, where the conflict broke out. last week and forced tens of thousands of people to leave the country.
Most of the boats left the Tunisian city of Sfax, the migrants said, many of them women and children.
Valério Valenti, the new extraordinary commissioner appointed by the government of Giorgia Meloni to manage the state of emergency declared by the executive, visited the small Sicilian island in his first action of the mandate and stated that “it is necessary to guarantee that the migrants arriving in Lampedusa can be transferred to the mainland as soon as possible”.
Also, about 500 migrants traveling on a fishing boat were rescued in recent hours and disembarked at the ports of Augusta and Catania, in Sicily, after being distributed aboard coastguard vessels and also a Frontex vessel, the European border control apparatus.
According to the latest data published by the Italian Ministry of the Interior, 33,480 migrants arrived on Italy’s coast, almost four times more than in the same period last year (8,432).
Source: DN
