Bloc will still ‘train’ Libya coast guard

Refugees, police clash

ROME, Oct 24, (Agencies): The European Union will go ahead with training for the Libyan coast guard this week, days after a coast guard vessel allegedly attacked a boat carrying migrants, causing four of them to drown.

The German humanitarian group Sea-Watch recovered the four bodies after an attack on Friday that its members say was carried out by a vessel with the markings of the Libyan coast guard.

“The aim was to start the training this week, and this week it will start,” the spokesman for the EU’s Operation Sophia, Antonello De Renzis Sonnino, told Reuters.

The bodies of the four migrants reached Palermo, Sicily, on Monday aboard the Norwegian rescue vessel Siem Pilot, which carried 1,100 rescued migrants and 13 other bodies.

A spokesman for the Libyan naval forces in Tripoli denied on Saturday that it had attacked the migrant boat but admitted it boarded the rubber dinghy.

Helped by Libya-based people smugglers, some 150,000 people have set off for Italy in unseaworthy boats so far this year. More than 3,100 died or disappeared during the crossing, making the Central Mediterranean the world’s most dangerous border for migrants.

Since Friday, more than 6,000 men, women and children have been rescued at sea. Migrant rescues are often complicated in Libya, where the U.N.-backed Tripoli government is struggling to impose its authority.

To help stem the flow of migrants, the EU agreed earlier this year to train the Libyan coast guard, which currently lacks the personnel and equipment to patrol over 1,700 km (1,056 miles) of coastline.

Beginning with up to 100 people this week, the EU aims to train around 1,000 Libyan coast guard members in total.

“If anything, last week’s incident shows that there’s a need for more training and there’s a need for it soon,” said a government source in Italy, one of the countries participating in the training.

A Palermo court has opened an investigation into the incident, prosecutor Maurizio Scalia told Reuters from the port, where the bodies were taken off the Siem Pilot in brown coffins.

Scalia

Migrants at a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos hurled stones at police and torched seven temporary offices used by asylum officials in an hour-long protest on Monday over conditions, officials said.

Jose Carreira, executive director of the European Asylum Support Office (EASO), said at least four containers where interviews were conducted were entirely destroyed, and three more were damaged.

“Incidents have occurred in the past but this is the most serious one,” Carreira told AFP.

“We are looking into ways of guaranteeing that this might not happen again,” said Carreira, who is in Athens for meetings with Greece’s immigration ministry.

EASO staff left the scene, Carreira said, and no one was hurt in the incident as the blaze was quickly brought under control by firefighters.

However, it could take days before asylum interviews can resume, he added.

Around 70 migrants took part in the protest, most of them from Pakistan and Bangladesh, a local police source said. Police made a dozen arrests.

The incident took place at the Moria camp, one of five centres on Greek Aegean islands, which have borne the brunt of Europe’s migrant crisis.

More than 15,000 migrants are being held on the Aegean islands, pending their return to Turkey under an EU-Turkish agreement reached in March this year.

Processing has been held up because the vast majority have filed for political asylum.

Moria has a capacity for 3,500 people but currently houses more than 5,000.

Tensions mounted Monday inside Bulgaria’s largest refugee camp as several hundred Afghan migrants launched a protest demanding they be allowed to continue their journey toward western Europe, a rights group said.

Some 300 people demonstrated at the Harmanli reception centre near the Turkish border, the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights said.

“They are protesting the fact that they’re being held in Bulgaria against their will and want to continue to Serbia and from there to (western) Europe,” spokeswoman Iliana Savova told AFP.

The Bulgarian interior ministry confirmed there were “tensions” inside the centre, which houses 3,800 migrants.

Officials added that negotiations with the striking Afghans were ongoing.

Some 13,000 illegal migrants remain stranded inside Bulgaria, after other key transit countries along the western Bproalkan route shut their borders earlier this year.

Around 70 percent are Afghans and 12 percent Syrians, according to government data.

Bulgaria recently announced a near doubling of its capacities to house asylum-seekers, paid for with EU funds, as the bloc’s poorest member state struggles to cope with the continent’s worst migrant crisis since World War II.

Syrian refugee children have been working in factories in Turkey making clothes for British high street retailer Marks & Spencer and online store ASOS , an investigation by BBC Panorama found.

The investigation, to be broadcast Monday evening, found Syrian refugees as young as 15 working long hours for little pay, making and ironing clothes to be shipped off to Britain.

BBC journalists took photographs of Marks & Spencer labels in the factories. Some Syrian refugees worked 12-hour days in a factory distressing jeans for fashion brands Mango and Zara, using chemicals with inadequate protection, the BBC said.

An M&S spokesperson said: “We had previously found no evidence of Syrian workers employed in factories that supply us, so we were very disappointed by these findings, which are extremely serious and are unacceptable to M&S.”

An ASOS spokeswoman said: “It’s a subject we take incredibly seriously. But it would be wrong for us to comment on reporting we haven’t seen.”

M&S said it was working with the Turkish supplier to offer permanent legal employment to any Syrian daily workers employed in the factory.