A seven-meter boat with 46 refugees on board sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa on Thursday shortly before coast guard lifeboats arrived. Fortunately, according to the Coast Guard, there were no dead or missing persons – all persons could be rescued. However, a rescue operation on the Turkish coast came to a tragic end on Wednesday: there, too, refugees were in distress at sea and two women were killed.
In the rescue operation off the coast of Lampedusa, all persons on board – including eleven women and three minors who left Sfax in Tunisia on Wednesday – were rescued. The migrants come from Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cameroon and Mali.
There were 33 people on a second boat, which was also drifting off Lampedusa. A total of 109 migrants arrived in Lampedusa overnight on three different boats. They were all taken to the island’s hot spot, which currently caters for 1,304 guests with a capacity of just under 400.
Unaccompanied minors on board
The rescue ship “Life Support”, which is active in rescue missions in the Mediterranean, has now entered the port of Livorno in Tuscany on Thursday with 142 migrants on board. It was accompanied by an Italian Coast Guard patrol boat, authorities said. On board were several unaccompanied minors and a pregnant woman. “They were rescued in two operations off the coast of Malta,” said Rossella Miccio, president of NGO Emergency.
A boat on the Turkish coast was also in distress on Wednesday: according to the Turkish coast guard, 43 migrants were rescued and two women were killed. One of them was pregnant, the authority said on Thursday. The migrants tried to get from the Turkish coast via the Aegean Sea to the Greek island of Samos – and thus to the EU.
Ankara accuses Greece of pushbacks
They also testified that the Greek Coast Guard illegally pushed them back to Turkey after they reached Greek waters. The boat filled with water. The statements could not be independently verified. The Coast Guard has not specified the nationality of the migrants.
Ankara repeatedly accuses Greece of so-called pushbacks, ie illegally pushing back migrants. Athens rejects this. Turkey has taken in about 3.7 million refugees from Syria’s civil war and hundreds of thousands of migrants from other countries.
Source: Krone
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