adminROME. – Italian warships rescued 290 migrants in the Mediterranean yesterday and Sicily declared a state of emergency as Rome launched a huge patrol operation to scare off people-smugglers. Drones, warships and helicopters were deployed inside and outside Italian waters following two tragic shipwrecks this month in which about 400 Eritrean, Somali and Syrian refugees drowned.
Hi-tech radars and night-vision equipment are also being used in the operation named Mare Nostrum (Our Sea), which is aimed at preventing another disaster in what Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta has called the “sea of death”.
The navy has dispatched five warships to patrol the vast area and said in a statement on Tuesday that it had already rescued 290 migrants near the island of Lampedusa, Italy’s southernmost point.
An Italian cargo ship also helped the Greek coastguard rescue 73 Syrians stranded on a yacht in the Ionian Sea after it ran out of fuel.
And a Panamanian merchant vessel picked up about 80 people adrift on a large raft in Libyan waters and took them to Sicily, the coastguard said.
Sicily’s regional assembly meanwhile approved an emergency decree that governor Rosario Crocetta said would speed up measures to deal with the growing influx of refugees across the Mediterranean.
The latest arrivals come on top of the 32 000 asylum seekers that the UN refugee agency says have landed in Italy and Malta so far this year.
Most leave from an increasingly lawless Libya and arrive in Lampedusa, where the tiny local refugee centre is often severely overcrowded.
Border guards said on Tuesday they had also seized a “mother ship” and arrested 17 crew members, who are believed to be Egyptian, following a landing in the southern Calabria region on Sunday. – AFP.
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