On just one ship, 1,000 migrants land in Italy
NEARLY 1,000 migrants arrived in Italy on just one rescue ship yesterday after being plucked from the Mediterranean.
They docked on a day in which another 3,400 people fleeing Africa were expected to arrive in the country.
The migrants were crammed aboard the Vos Prudence, one of a number of ships used by the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors Without Borders).
The 246ft vessel can transport 600 people with emergency capacity for another 400, as well as 13 staff. Approximately 935 migrants were aboard when it docked at Salerno in south-west Italy, after several days at sea. They included 793 men and 125 women, of whom seven were pregnant.
A woman who was in labour was among the first to get off, along with a man who was injured and 16 children, including two infants. This year has already seen a record 86,123 migrants making the dan-geroustrip to Italy.
Yesterday, a further 1,428 disembarked from an Italian coastguard vessel in the Sicilian port of Catania, while 860 were due to arrive in Brindisi and 1,200 in Crotone. Dozens of charities operate rescue boats in the area, but critics accuse aid workers of running a ‘taxi service’, taking people off unsafe boats near the coast of Libya and bringing them to Italy. The Italian government is looking to stem the flow of migrants into the country and has drawn up a draft code of conduct for nongovernmental organisations oper- ating in the Mediterranean. Among its proposals is a ban on making phone calls or firing flares that might signal to human traffickers that they could push their migrant boats out to sea.
The guidelines include forcing the charities to be accompanied by police to root out human traffickers. Those that refuse risk being barred from Italy and forced to sail to other EU ports to drop off rescued migrants.
UN refugee agency spokesman Carlotta Sami said Italy needed more help from the EU to cope with the crisis.