Italian coast guard and navy bring hundreds of migrants ashore

11 March 2023, 19:34

Fishing boat with migrants
Migration Italy. Picture: PA

An influx of sea arrivals followed a crackdown by Italy’s right-wing government on people-smugglers.

Italian coast guard and navy vessels have ferried hundreds of rescued migrants to shore.

The influx of sea arrivals came in the face of a crackdown by Italy’s right-wing government on people-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 on Friday in the Ionian Sea off Calabria.

March for victims
People march in solidarity with the families of the victims of a deadly shipwreck that killed at least 74 migrants when their boat sank off the shores of Calabria, in Cutro, southern Italy (AP)

A 310ft 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 by Italian vessels some 60 nautical miles off Crotone in Calabria on Friday, was aided by two coast guard motorboats and a border police boat.

The migrants disembarked in Crotone’s port before dawn on Saturday.

A beach in Cutro, a town south of Crotone, is where survivors and bodies were found on February 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 to 76 on Saturday after the bodies of two children and an adult were recovered, Italian news agency ANSA reported.

Migration Italy
Police check a fishing boat with some 500 migrants in the southern Italian port of Crotone (AP)

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 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 UN 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.

Shipwreck victims burial
Some of the victims of the migrant shipwreck of Cutro being buried at the cemetery of Borgo Panigale, near Bologna (LaPresse via AP)

The Turkish coast guard reported on 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 Italy’s tiny 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.

By Press Association

Latest World News

See more Latest World News

Moment ‘mildly hypothermic’ wild campers are rescued after experiencing ‘full force’ of Storm Bert

Moment ‘mildly hypothermic’ wild campers are rescued after experiencing ‘full force’ of Storm Bert

Ryan Kobayashi, the father of missing photographer Hannah, has been found dead.

Father of missing photographer Hannah Kobayashi found dead in LA

A piece of debris from a DHL cargo plane

One dead after DHL cargo plane crashes and skids into house in Lithuania

Holly Bowles, 19, from Melbourne, has died in the ‘methanol mass poisoning’.

Doctor reveals Laos poisoning victim ‘went from confused to comatose in 30 minutes’

Russia soldier with gun on back of vehicle

Putin offers to wipe out debt of new army recruits

Close-up of the supermoon

Earth bids farewell to temporary ‘mini moon’

An Israeli police bomb squad inspects the site after a missile fired from Lebanon hit the area in Petah Tikva, on the outskirts of Tel Aviv, Israel

Hezbollah fires about 250 rockets and other projectiles into Israel

Homes are flooded by the overflowing Pasajahuira River in La Paz, Bolivia

Girl missing as heavy rains in Bolivia cause landslide in capital La Paz

Uruguay Election

Uruguay’s governing party concedes presidential run-off to left-wing challenger

Australia Social Media Bill

Social media sites call for Australia to delay its ban on child use

New Zealand Whale Stranding

New Zealanders help to save 30 whales after a pod strands on a beach

South Korea Plastic Pollution Treaty

Nations meet as part of final bid to address global plastic crisis

Newtown Shooting Infowars

Judge in Alex Jones’ bankruptcy to hear arguments on The Onion’s Infowars bid

A smoke rises from the place where a DHL cargo plane crashed into a house near the Lithuanian capital Vilnius

One dead after DHL cargo plane crashes in Lithuania

Indonesia Landslide

Landslide and flash floods leave 16 dead in Sumatra, Indonesia

Ariana Campos takes part in a march marking the upcoming International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, in Lima, Peru

140 women and girls killed by partner or relative per day in 2023 – UN