[ad_1]
Italy’s Coast Guard rescued 57 migrants from two boats that capsized throughout the night time in tough seas south of a tiny Italian island and recovered two our bodies, authorities mentioned.
In an announcement, the coast guard says it recovered the physique of a boy and a girl from one of many capsized vessels and quotes survivors as saying some 30 migrants had been lacking.
Some 20 others had been stranded on rocks after a 3rd shipwreck on Sunday.
According to those that had been rescued, 28 individuals had been lacking from one vessel and three from the opposite.
The rescued migrants had been discovered 23 nautical miles (42.5 kilometres) south-west of Lampedusa.
Meanwhile, a number of migrants had been clinging desperately to jagged rocks of a tall reef off Lampedusa since early Saturday after a 3rd boat crashed into the craggy outcropping west of the island’s lighthouse.
Strong winds and highly effective waves made any Coast Guard rescue too harmful.
The specialists had been planning to rescue the stranded migrants utilizing the helicopter, the mountaineering group mentioned.
In all, 34 migrants had been stranded for 2 nights on the reef, together with a girl who’s eight months pregnant, mentioned newspaper Giornale di Sicilia. She was taken to a hospital, it mentioned.
Earlier, helicopters dropped meals and water all the way down to the migrants, Italian state TV reported.
Ignazio Schintu, an official of the Italian Red Cross says so many migrants have made the crossing in smugglers’ unseaworthy boats launched from Libya and Tunisia in latest days that 2,450 migrants had been at the moment housed at Lampedusa’s non permanent residence, which has a capability of about 400.
Once the winds slacken and the seas flip calm, Italy will resume ferrying lots of of migrants to Sicily to ease the overcrowding, Mr Schintu advised state TV.
The two boats that capsized in open seas had been believed to have set out from Sfax — a Tunisian port — on Thursday, when sea circumstances had been good, based on authorities.
But since circumstances had been forecast to show dangerous on Saturday, “it’s even more criminal for smugglers to let them leave,” mentioned Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesperson from the UN migration company IOM.
Before Saturday, a complete of 1,814 migrants had been recognized to have perished whereas trying the Mediterranean crossing to Italy in boats launched from Tunisia or Libya, he mentioned.
Libyan departures was once riskier, he mentioned, however as a result of Tunisia-based smugglers have been utilizing notably flimsy vessels recently, that route is turning into more and more deadlier.
Migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are setting out from Tunisia in “fragile iron vessels that after 24 hours, often break in two, and the migrants fall into the sea,” Mr Di Giacomo mentioned.
[adinserter block=”4″]
[ad_2]
Source link