A tragic weekend on the world’s deadliest migration route, the central Mediterranean. Two precarious barges sank off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa due to extreme weather conditions, leaving some thirty missing. The Italian Coast Guard managed, after a difficult operation, to save 57 migrants alive and the lifeless bodies of two people, a woman and a minor.
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The Mediterranean Sea, the largest mass grave in the world, continues to send desperate migrants to its depths: at least thirty people are missing in its waters. In the last hours, the Italian coastal authorities recovered the bodies of a woman and a minor, coming from the Ivory Coast, after the capsizing, during the night, of two boats off the European coast.
This Sunday, the Italian Coast Guard managed to rescue 57 sub-Saharan migrants whose barge had capsized off the island of Lampedusa. However, they reported more than thirty people were still missing. The survivors indicated that there were about 90 people on board the two boats. According to Italian media, they set sail on Thursday from the Tunisian city of Sfax, one of the main ports of departure for sub-Saharan migration to Europe.
Weather conditions made rescue difficult and, according to the coast guard, these would have been the cause of the shipwrecks. It doesn’t matter if they are made of iron, wood or plastic, the precarious and overcrowded boats, in which traffickers load migrants and refugees in exchange for a large amount of money, are left defenseless once they sail into the open sea and their weather conditions.
“Smugglers set sub-Saharan migrants on iron boats that cost less than the usual wooden ones, but are completely unnavigable, break and sink easily,” criticized the press officer of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). ), Flavio DiGiacomo. The organization believes that the fact that the migrants were on board a battered iron barge, along with extreme weather conditions, caused the shipwrecks.
Strong winds and waves made rescue difficult
Another group of about twenty migrants, including a minor and two pregnant women, had to wait two days on the rocks of a cliff, on the Italian island, due to the inaccessibility of rescuers due to strong winds and the intense waves. Their boat ran aground after hitting a reef on Friday and they have been clinging to the rocks ever since, hoping to be rescued.
Finally, they were taken out of the place with the help of an Italian aerial forces helicopter and transferred to the Lampedusa reception centers, which already exceed their official capacity by more than 2,000 people. The Italian Ministry of the Interior points out that more than 92,000 people, coming from Africa, have disembarked in its territory in 2023the vast majority come from Tunisia.
Tunisia, new port of departure for migration
Recently, the dangerous “Tunisian route” has become popular among desperate asylum seekers, with traffickers promoting travel to Europe via the central Mediterranean, the deadliest route in the world. While the European Union paid 1,000 million euros to the Tunisian authorities to stop migration. The bloc has sought that said country become the first barrier with Europe, outsourcing its borders and its “security” to “third countries”.
“This is more tragic news regarding the lives of people who make long journeys in prohibitive conditions,” Rosario Valastro, president of the Italian Red Cross, told a local agency.
In so far this year, at least 1,800 people have lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean, but the IOM estimates that the figure would be much higher. This also means an increase of almost 900 more deaths than in the first eight months of 2022.
“The truth is that that number is likely to be much higher. A lot of bodies are being found in the sea, which suggests there are a lot of shipwrecks that we never hear about,” Di Giacomo said. And it is that since 2014, almost 30,000 people have disappeared in the Mediterranean.
With AFP, Reuters and local media
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