Theresa Maggio

United Nations officials said on Tuesday that 245 migrants were feared dead in two shipwrecks in the Mediterranean Sea. The death toll represents a major increase to an already grim tally this year.

More than 1,300 people are now estimated to have died while trying to cross the Mediterranean to Europe in 2017, most while attempting to  Read More 

From La Repubblica 8 May 2017:

Luigi Duro, a 44-year-old security guard who was laid off from his job, decided to protect the splendid white, flowing "Fountain of Shame" in Piazza Pretoria as an act of civil service and to keep his feeling of having a purpose in life. He started his vigil yesterday morning.
He made himself a little badge with his name on it so he can look more authoritative, he said. "I decided to spend my time working for the common good," he said. " I decided to put my twenty-some years of experience in security to some good, without making any profit from it." Read More 

From La Repubblica 6 May 2017
CATANIA, Sicily -- The rescue ship Phoenix belonging to the non-governmental organization MOAS docked at this port this morning bearing 394 rescued migrants and one dead 10-year-old boy who was allegedly murdered by his trafficker. MOAS co-founder Regina Catrambone, who was also aboard, said the boy was pistol- whipped to death by a trafficker when the boy refused to give the trafficker his baseball cap. NGOs rescuing migrants at sea have been accused by certain Catania officials of accepting money from traffickers to pick up shipwrecked migrants and plague Europe with them. Catambrone and the other NGOs say they run their operations with donations from supporters. Read More 

From La Repubblica Palermo online, 5 May 2019:
CATANIA -- The Doctors Without Borders research and rescue ship Prudence docked at Catania at 7 this morning with the bodies of six dead immigrants who had drowned in the Mediterranean. Five women and one man who had left Libya aboard improvised small boats along with hundreds of people fleeing famine and poverty in Africa. For the volunteers of Doctors Without Borders it was difficult to identify them: the six had been dead in the water for days before being picked up by volunteers. Read More 

A minute and a half with Rick Steves in Palermo's markets.

Doctors Without Borders in the Mediteranean operates from a NGO shp Aquarius to save migrants standed and in danger of drowning at sea . Today they resued 187 migrants.

When he saw boats in the distance, Issa knew he was going to live. It was July 2014 and he had spent hours in the sea, clinging to a plastic petrol container while women, men and children drowned around him. The small rubber boat that was supposed to take them all to Italy had sunk just two hours after leaving the Libyan coast. Of the 137 people Issa says were on board, only 49 survived.

Issa, from Burkina Faso, was not rescued by any passing ship but was picked up by the Libyan coastguard. Rather than being taken to a safe port in Italy as he had hoped, he was returned to Libya where he was handed over to the police. He says he was locked up for months in appalling conditions and beaten regularly by policemen who demanded money in exchange for his release.

“My hands were tied behind my back,” he said. “I was laying on the floor facing down, and they were beating me on the back with a belt and electric cables.”

Only after Issa’s family scraped together 625 OOO CFA (about £900), was he finally released.

In September last year, he tried to reach Italy again but after three days at sea, the boat he was on landed back on Libyan shores. “We were arrested upon arrival and taken to a prison in Tripoli, and two weeks later we were transferred to the city of Sabha. We learnt that we had been sold to traffickers.” After a month in captivity, he and others managed to escape. “Our abductors shot some people. I don’t know whether any of them died,” he said. Read More 

A hundred refugees and migrants crammed into a small dinghy that started taking in water in the Mediterranean endured an agonising 30-hour wait before they were rescued, a maritime log passed to the Guardian has revealed.

The incident happened over the Easter weekend, the unofficial start of the “sailing season”, which sees increased numbers of people attempting the crossing from Africa to Europe as the weather improves.

Twenty children and 10 women, one of them pregnant, were among the passengers on the overcrowded dinghy.  Read More 

On the 19th April 2015, an estimated 700 children, women and men drowned in the Mediterranean while desperately searching for a new life in safety and peace. The European community was outraged and politicians vowed: ‘never again’.

The following year, on the 18th of April, up to 500 people died in shipwrecks off the Libyan coast.

AsMOAS prepared to commemorate these mass tragedies, our crew were out in the Central Mediterranean on our search and rescue vessel, the Phoenix. Our 2017 mission had launched 2 weeks earlier; a date chosen precisely to avoid yet more April tragedies. As the Phoenix travelled to the zone of operations following a period of bad weather, they knew that many rescues lay ahead of them; but they could never have anticipated the scale of what they were about to face.

Here, we will set out how the weekend unfolded, and how it was that through the determination, teamwork and solidarity among everyone at sea, another mass tragedy was avoided.

On Good Friday, 14th April 2017, throughout the day over 2000 people were rescued by SAR agencies, mostly NGOs and coast guard vessels. The Phoenix participated in the rescue of 273 people, transferring everyone to an Italian coast guard vessel so that our crew could remain in the area to assist  Read More 

From the Guardian:
Every time a ship with rescued migrants enters the harbour of Palermo, the mayor goes to greet them. “Welcome,” he says to them. “The worst is over. You are citizens of Palermo now.”

From La Repubblica Palermo online:

In nineteen operations at sea yesterday rescuers saved more than two thousand immigrants leaving Africa from Libya and headed to Italy.
With the sea calm, the human traffickers decided to send off to Europe 16 overcrowded rubber rafts and three small wooden boats for a total of 2,074 rescued migrants.
The volunteers of Doctors Without Borders and the staff of the NGO SOS Mediterranee are aboard the ship Aquarius said in a tweet that in one of the rescue operations they found a dead teenage boy on the bottom of one of the rafts. "The sea continues to serve as a graveyard," they wrote on Twitter. Read More