FROM THE CORRESPONDENT FROM CATANIA. Migrants’ Christmas is in the middle of the sea, between rescued people and people waiting for help that in some cases risks being useless. There is a request for help from Alarm Phone, the “migrant switchboard”, for a boat with about 25 people on board, in the Maltese SAR area. They have been asking for help since Thursday but so far no one has reached them. Alarm Phone also launched a “Mayday” to merchant ships in the area, to no avail. “We have lost contact and the boat is no longer found”, the dramatic tweet of the NGO that at lunchtime on Christmas day also asked for help for a boat with 108 people in difficulty off the coast of Calabria. And while in the Aegean there are the dead of three other shipwrecks, from Libya there are images of five bodies found on Thursday among the rocks of Deela beach, near Zawyia. Maydayterraneo published them, a site that deals with migrants and what happens in the central Mediterranean. Nobody knows who they are or when their boat was wrecked and what people were on board.
The sea between Libya and Tunisia on one side and Italy and Malta on the other, in recent days has again been filled with boats and hopes, but also with desperation. The Italian Coast Guard managed to track down and rescue 89 people one mile from Capo Grecale, in Lampedusa. The migrants, who say they come from Bangladesh, Eritrea, Pakistan and Gambia, were taken to the island’s htospot where another 253 people had arrived on their own yesterday with 8 boats. There are currently around 450 migrants in the hotspot.
The Sea Watch 3 in the afternoon today carried out the fourth rescue of castaways in just 30 hours, recovering 78 people off the coast of Libya, again after an Alarm Phone report: now the smaller of the two ships of the German NGO has 350 on board people who must have a “Pos”, a safe harbor in which to disembark. They are added to the 558 people on board the Geo Barents, the ship of Doctors Without Borders, recovered in 8 different operations; the ship is sailing between Malta and Lampedusa, waiting for the indication of a port of disembarkation, which has already been requested several times from the authorities of Rome and Valletta. In Trapani, this morning, the rescue operation of the Ocean Viking of Sos Mediterranée ended with the landing of the 114 migrants; the migrants were taken to the nearby reception center in the Milo district and then immediately transferred for the observation period for Covid: adults and families on the quarantine ship Gnv Adriatica, in a reception center for unaccompanied minors.
The alarm in the Ionian Sea, off the coast of Calabria, concerns a boat that comes from Turkey and which would have 108 people on board. Also in this case the report comes from the Alarm Phone: “We are told that the boat is sinking – tweeted the NGO – we fear the worst and we ask that help be immediately launched to avoid another shipwreck”. At dawn today, off the coast of Isola Capo Rizzuto, the Guardia di Finanza had intercepted a sailing ship of the “Turkish route” with about a hundred people on board, 25 are minors, then landed in Crotone. Two suspected smugglers were arrested.