adminRome – More than 2,000 migrants were rescued from five wooden boats in the Mediterranean on Saturday and as many as seven other vessels have been reported at sea, the privately funded Migrant Offshore Aid Station (MOAS) and Italy’s coastguard said.
“MOAS co-ordinated the rescue of over 2,000 people together with Italian, Irish and German ships,” the group tweeted. The migrants were packed onto wooden fishing boats in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast.
Italy’s coastguard, which co-ordinates sea rescue efforts from Rome, could not confirm the number of migrants who had been saved so far, but said about a dozen different migrant boats had been reported and rescue operations were ongoing.
“We’ve several assets at work,” a coastguard spokesperson said.
During the first five months of the year, there were 46,500 sea arrivals in Italy, a 12 percent increase on the same period of last year, the UN refugee agency said. Italy’s government projects 200,000 will come this year, up from 170,000 in 2014. — AFP
Online Reporter
Bongani Ndlovu