Theresa Maggio

Eleven days after they were rescued off Lampedusa  by British artist Banksy's humanitarian ship, the Louise Michel, 150 surviving migrants were transfered to the quaratine ship GNV Allegra in the waters off Palermo. The quarantine ship carries 350 people who must spend fifteen days aboard while it cruises along the Sicilian coasts. Among them are some one-hundred unaccompaned children. Today the ship sails off the coast of Augusta.

 

 

 

 

 

 

From reporter Lorenzo Tondo in Palermo for The Guardian:

 

So far in 2020, more than 500 refugees are known to have died in the Mediterranean, and the real number is estimated to be considerably higher.

A boat carrying dozens of refugees has burst into flames off the coast of southern Italy as its passengers were being transferred to Italian naval vessels to take them to port.

Five people are confirmed dead and two are missing at sea. Six people are in hospital with serious burns injuries, including two Italian officials who were taking the people off the boat.

The vessel was approached by an Italian naval ship that was in the process of taking migrants onboard and, according to preliminary reports, suddenly caught fire, most likely because of a fuel leakage, then exploded. The number of victims is still uncertain.....

Lampedusa in the immigration news again now that ships are again allowed to land immigrants. This is from The Guardian:

At least 13 women have died and eight children are missing after a boat capsized in rough seas off the Italian island of Lampedusa on Sunday night as a patrol vessel attempted to save it.

Italian authorities have rescued 22 survivors from the boat, which was carrying about 50 people. Only four of the 13 recovered bodies have been identified by surviving family members, including that of a 12-year-old girl.

According to an initial reconstruction of events, all the people onboard moved to one end of the vessel as the rescue boat arrived, causing it to overturn. The boat, carrying mostly people from sub-Saharan Africa, had initially left Libya before sailing along the coast to reach the city of Sfax, in Tunisia, where another 15 people boarded before they continued their journey to Sicily, according to survivors.

Click on the photo to be directed to an English-language podcast, an interview with the rescue ship captain Italian Interior Minister Salvini has called a pirate and Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando calls a hero, provided by the The Guardian newspaper.

From The Guardian 7 Jan. 2018

From today's La Repubblica Palermo edition;
The NGO ship Aquarius pulled into Pozzallo, Sicily's port today with 320 migrants aboard, among them many women and numerous children. They had all been rescued from the Mediterranean in the previous days. Weather conditions at sea were harsh, the newspaper reported.

A documentary from The Guardian

Amadou Sumaila was one of 118 people rescued from an inflatable boat drifting 20 miles off the Libyan coast on a clear, calm morning in August last year. The kind of day for which people smugglers hope and their passengers pray.

The young Malian and more than 363,000 other migrants and refugees crossed the Mediterranean to reachEurope in 2016. Like many of them, Sumaila had never seen the sea, never imagined that so many people could be crammed into a small boat and never thought it would be so hard to breathe.

They were starting to think about death when dawn came, followed by a boat from the German NGO Jugend Rettet. The crew of the Iuventa had come to save lives, but one of its passengers, the Spanish-Iranian photographer César Dezfuli, had come determined to preserve faces.

Once the 118 were safely aboard, Dezfuli asked if he could take their pictures.  Read More 

From Palermo Today:
Of the 606 migrants, 241 were children, 120 of those children came unaccompanied.
The shipwrecked migrants were rescued in seven operations in less than 36 hours. On board the Franco-Italian-German rescue ship were 11 pregnant women, two of whom were in their ninth month. There was also a week-old infant.
"The extremely high numbers of minors," said Palermo Mayor Leoluca Orlando, "is the confirmation of a human drama without pause and without Europe feeling shame. Today we found ourselves before a dramatic choice made by members of the families of these minors put in the hands of the merchants of death with the hope of getting them to Europe, which, however, continues to ignore this drama, staining themselves with criminal behavior that produces and feeds criminal organizations. We here in Palermo are quite different from all that and the city with its organization and its institutions make it the "Capital of Welcome." Read More 

Translation:
🔴 rescue
339 people rescued at sea in the last 24 hours are now safe on the Aquarius.
The teams from SOS MEDITERRANEE France intervened on 3 operations Tuesday (2 rescues and a transfer to another ship in the night) and on a first rescue this Wednesday morning.
All rescue operations on Tuesday and Wednesday were coordinated by the MRCC of Rome, which asked the Aquarius to move to other vessels in difficulty identified in international waters off Libya.
The Humanitarian Emergency continues in the Mediterranean!
#TogetherForRescue Read More 

As a consequence of a drop in the number of boats reaching international waters in the Mediterranean Sea, MSF has decided to reduce its activities at sea and to end search and rescue operations of its boat Prudence. MSF will continue its presence in the Central Mediterranean with the ship Aquarius, run in coordination  Read More