Migrant aid ship rams Italian police boat; captain arrested

LAMPEDUSA, Sicily — The German captain of a humanitarian rescue ship with 40 migrants aboard has been arrested after she rammed her vessel into an Italian border police motorboat while docking at a tiny Mediterranean island Saturday in defiance of Italy’s anti-migrant interior minister.

Jeering onlookers shouted “handcuffs, handcuffs” as Carola Rackete, the 31-year-old captain, was escorted off the boat at Lampedusa, which is closer to north Africa than to the Italian mainland.

The migrants, meanwhile, hugged personnel of the German Sea-Watch charity who helped them during their 17 days at sea. Some kissed the ground after disembarking from SeaWatch 3 at dawn’s break.

The migrants had been rescued from an unseaworthy vessel launched by Libya-based human traffickers but Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini had refused to let them disembark on Lampedusa until other European Union countries agreed to take them. Five nations pledged to do so on Friday: Finland, France, Germany, Luxembourg and Portugal.

The humanitarian rescue operation ended dramatically and violently when Rackete decided she could no longer wait for permission to dock given the odyssey of the migrants aboard.

“It’s enough. After 16 days following the rescue, #SeaWatch3 enters in port,” the organization tweeted early Saturday shortly before the ship started heading dockside.

The captain steered her vessel toward the island before dawn, ramming the much smaller police boat, which was blocking SeaWatch 3’s path to the dock.

In past years, Lampedusa had won international praise for its generous welcome to many of the hundreds of thousands of rescued migrants.

But even as the migrants’ numbers dwindled as Italy cracked down on private rescue ships, many Italians lost patience, including economic migrants ineligible for asylum. Salvini’s anti-migrant League party has soared in popularity.