FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM CATANIA. Augusta is the port of destination indicated by the Interior Ministry and the Coast Guard to the commander of the Ocean Viking, the ship of the NGO Sos Mediterranée which for a week had been asking Italy and Malta for a “Pos”, a safe harbor. This was communicated by the NGO itself with a tweet: “The relief on the Ocean Viking is indescribable, the Italian authorities have informed us that the 306 shipwrecked people will disembark in Augusta”. The ship, which last week had taken 314 migrants on board in three different operations, sailed for days around Lampedusa but since yesterday it had moved between the island of Pelagie and the South East coast of Sicily, where it was also tonight when the communication of the port where the migrants will be able to disembark has arrived. “A strong storm is coming tonight – warns the NGO -. States must put a landing mechanism back in place to avoid these continuous stalemates at sea ”. Several times, the NGO had described the difficulties of the situation on board, where the condition of migrants often victims of torture in Libya was also accompanied by inclement weather: “Dripping blankets, running out of rain sheets, the castaways chattering their teeth to the cold. The weather is still bad, ”they announced from the ship just this morning.
In recent days, 8 migrants had been taken away from the ship with three different “medevac”, medical evacuations, carried out by the Coast Guard of Lampedusa.
The ship’s arrival in Augusta is scheduled for tomorrow. In the commercial port of the city north of Syracuse there is already the Gnv Atlas, one of the quarantine ships, but it is not clear if this will be the ship that will welcome the group of migrants. The Atlas was in fact set off for Lampedusa, where in the last few days there have been autonomous landings of small boats, mostly from Tunisia but also from Libya, despite the prohibitive conditions of the central Mediterranean where currently no NGO ship is in operation. except little Nadir of Resqship. There are currently almost a thousand migrants on the island and the prefecture of Agrigento has started a transfer program that should start tomorrow morning, with the boarding of about sixty people on the scheduled ferry. The Catholic Church of Agrigento and the Federation of Evangelical Churches in Italy, in a joint statement expressed “concern for the difficult conditions of reception of migrants that the island of Lampedusa continues to experience”.
In Pozzallo, in the Ragusa area, the 396 migrants who arrived last night autonomously with a fishing boat that ran aground at the port entrance – dramatic rescue operations by the Coast Guard, Financial Police and harbor tugs – were taken to the gym municipal authorities awaiting their transfer to another quarantine ship.