Italy’s forces transporting rescued migrants to shore

ROME — Italian coast guard and navy vessels ferried Saturday hundreds of rescued migrants toward shore, while elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea thousands of migrants overflowed from a shelter on a tiny tourist island.

The influx of sea arrivals came in the face of a crackdown by Italy’s rightwing government on human smugglers announced only two days earlier.

The coast guard said in a statement that overcrowding on two vessels and adverse sea and weather conditions had complicated rescue operations that began Friday in the Ionian Sea off Calabria.

A 310-foot-long coast guard vessel took 584 migrants aboard, while two smaller coast guard motorboats took on 379 and then transferred them to an Italian naval vessel, which was headed to Augusta, a port in eastern Sicily, as migrant shelters in Calabria quickly filled up.

Separately, a boat carrying 487 people, intercepted Friday by Italian vessels some 60 nautical miles off Crotone in Calabria, was aided by two coast guard motorboats and a border police boat. The migrants disembarked in Crotone’s port before dawn Saturday.

A beach in Cutro, a town south of Crotone, is where survivors and bodies were found Feb. 26 after a wooden boat, crowded with migrants who had set out from Turkey days earlier, broke apart on a sandbank.

The known death toll from the shipwreck climbed Saturday to 76 after the bodies of two children and an adult were recovered, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Eighty passengers survived, but others were reported missing and presumed dead.

Italian prosecutors are investigating whether authorities should have swiftly launched a rescue operation after a patrol plane operated by Frontex, the European Union’s border protection agency, spotted the wooden boat, hours before it broke apart dozens of yards from the beach.

Some 5,000 people, walking behind a bearer of a cross fashioned from the boat’s wreckage, joined a procession to the beach in Cutro on Saturday, demanding increased efforts to save migrants at sea.

The U.N. migration agency estimates that some 300 people have died this year, or were missing and presumed dead, after attempting to cross the perilous central Mediterranean route.

The Turkish coast guard reported Saturday that its personnel rescued 11 migrants off the coast of Turkey’s Aydin province after their rubber dinghy burst and started to take water. The bodies of five people were recovered, while a search for other possible survivors and victims continued, the coast guard said in a statement.

Meanwhile, on Lampedusa island, an Italian fishing and tourist location south of Sicily, some 3,000 newly arrived migrants overflowed from a shelter meant to hold less than 350. Hundreds of migrants spent the night sleeping on mattresses on the fenced-off grounds of the shelter.

Plans to ease some of the overcrowding on Lampedusa by transferring hundreds of migrants aboard a ferry were complicated by high winds whipping the island, making it impossible for the ship to dock on Saturday morning. Italian media reported that some 140 migrants were then transferred from the island by air.

Authorities on Lampedusa said many of the migrants arriving on the island, which is closer to northern Africa than to the Italian mainland, had sailed from the port of Sfax, in Tunisia, a route increasingly used by smugglers.