Two dead, 57 rescued from migrant shipwrecks off Italy's Lampedusa

autotldr Bot , 1 year ago

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Rescue operations on Saturday south of Lampedusa were “complex”, the coastguard said, confirming media reports that the two sunken migrant boats had probably set off from Sfax, a hot spot for Tunisia’s migration crisis.

Provincial police chief Emanuele Ricifari was quoted by local news website Agrigento Notizie as saying that whoever allowed the migrants to sail in such bad weather “is a crazy criminal with no scruples”.

On Sunday, mountain rescuers were deployed to pick up 20 migrants stuck on a cliff since late on Friday, when their boat hit rocks on arrival in Lampedusa, local media said.

Meanwhile, NGO group Open Arms wrote on social media site X that it had begun disembarking 195 rescued migrants in the southern Italian port of Brindisi, after more than two days of sailing in rough seas.

Italy’s right-wing government has a policy of assigning far-away ports to charity ships, rather than letting them disembark migrants in Lampedusa or Sicily, with the aim of spreading arrivals across the country.

NGOs say this increases their navigation costs, prolongs the misery of survivors, and reduces the amount of time charity ships can patrol areas of the Mediterranean where shipwrecks are more common.

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