Five patrol boats, three ships and a Coast Guard plane. And now also a Navy ship to lend a hand. What a rescue operation should be like. It is the impressive device implemented in the lower Ionian to rescue over a thousand migrants arriving from the coasts of Cyrenaica on three big fishing boats 100 miles southeast of Roccella Ionica.
Rescue operations are coordinated by the Rome Coast Guard Operations Center in the Italian SAR area of responsibility. The operations are “particularly complex due to the high number of people present on board the drifting boats”, explain the Coast Guard who also envisaged the use of an ATR 42 aircraft, Corsican ship e you Nave Visalli.
Also asked for the help of the Navy which immediately ordered the intervention of the Sirius ship already present in the area for its operational activities, to integrate the Coast Guard vehicles currently engaged on the scene of the action. The military ship is proceeding at the maximum speed allowed to provide the requested assistance, the Ministry of Defense said in a statement. The weather conditions, due to the strong south-west wind, are getting worse.
Twenty Sar cases declared
It all started around 9 this morning. Five hundred people, including many women and children, are on a fishing boat in difficulty – taking on water – in the Italian Sar area. The alarm for a new emergency and for such a large number of people was raised by the migrants’ Alarm phone switchboard which was contacted by some of the people on board. But according to the Radio Radicale journalist, Sergio Scandura, which monitors interventions in the Mediterranean, “there would be three boats arriving with more than a thousand people” . And, in addition, about twenty cases of Sar opened, with the intervention of numerous military means, including the Eighteen ship of the Coast Guard, which was about to reach Lampedusa for the transfer to the mainland of some of the approximately three thousand migrants who crowd the hotspot (400 places available) in desperate conditions, and which on the way to the island rescued over 480 migrants at sea (The large ship of the Coast Guard later arrived at the island of Pelagie where it took on board 188 people who were in the structure in the Imbriacola district).
Frontex alarm …
The fishing vessel was sighted by the same Frontex plane which had identified the caique which then sank on 26 February in Cutro – where 73 people died (but many refugees embarked in Smyrna are still missing and are being searched for at sea) provoking harsh criticism government for the lack of humanitarian intervention – which has now launched a new alarm. And from a US Navy helicopter: it allegedly left the coast of Cyrenaica and, in its last known position, around 9 this morning, is proceeding towards the eastern coast of Sicily in the direction of Syracuse. Alarm phone also publishes the map of the area where the vessel is located and has asked the Italian maritime authorities to take the field.
… relaunched by Mediterranea
The head of mission of Mediterranea also asked for the immediate intervention of the authorities in the morning, Luca Casarini: “Mrcc Rome has had all the information for several hours – he says -. For the avoidance of doubt, this is a situation of distress. We ask that they please send Coast Guard air and naval assets to open a Sar event. You don’t need a police operation. It is a fishing boat full of refugees – adds Casarini – fleeing and asking for help. There are dozens of women and children. And from the edge they report ad Alarm phone which are already taking on water. There’s not a minute to lose”