More Than 2,000 Migrants Rescued Off Italian Coast
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Version 0 of 1. ROME — Italian Navy and Coast Guard vessels rescued about 2,400 migrants coming from North Africa over the past two days, the authorities said Wednesday. The Italian authorities, working with three merchant ships, saved 2,128 migrants along the southern coast of Sicily on Tuesday, and the coast guard rescued 268 Eritrean and Syrian migrants about 10 miles east of the Italian island of Lampedusa the following day. “This is a very serious emergency and the toll will rise; we estimate that about 2,000 more people will be coming in the next days,” said Flavio Di Giacomo, the spokesman for the International Organization for Migration in Italy. “We have never seen 13 boats coming at once, especially in March. We had many arrivals from Tunisia in 2011, but that was the Arab Spring.” The number of migrants reaching Italian shores in the first months of the year were 10 times as high as in the same period for 2013, Mr. Di Giacomo said. About 500 migrants were rescued by the Italian authorities from January to March last year, and more than 5,000 had been rescued in 2014 as of last week. Most of the boats intercepted in recent days were sailing from Libya, the authorities said. Italy has increasingly struggled with the influx of migrants from North Africa who have attempted to cross the Mediterranean, often in old wooden boats, ever since the Arab Spring broke down the order in Libya in 2011. The civil war in Syria has added to the problem, with thousands of Syrians attempting to make the perilous journey. After two major disasters off the Sicilian coast last year that took hundreds of lives, Italy has increased its naval and air patrols in the area. At the same time, the Italian authorities are trying to fight the illegal networks that profit from the migrants’ desperation to reach Europe. On Tuesday, the Italian police arrested eight Egyptian citizens who are believed to have coordinated the journeys of at least 1,000 migrants from Sicily to Northern Italy and Europe last year. Investigators said members of the Egyptian criminal network would have provided logistical help, mainly to their fellow countrymen and Syrian citizens, by sheltering them in apartments or warehouses near the Sicilian ports of entry before organizing the transfer of the migrants to Northern Italy and beyond. They could face charges of criminal association and facilitating illegal immigration. “We are just at the beginning for this year,” Filippo Marini, a spokesman for the Italian Coast Guard, said. “Good weather conditions do favor sailings across the Mediterranean. We simply expect more to come.” |