First migrant boats from Libya arrive in Italy
LAMPEDUSA – Three boats laden with hundreds of African migrants fleeing Libya arrived in Italy on Sunday, the first such vessels to reach Europe since the start of the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.
The boats carried around 800 people – mostly Eritreans, Ethiopians and Somalians – and were taken to the tiny outcrop of Linosa close to the larger island of Lampedusa where thousands have been arriving from Tunisia.
Some of the migrants – many of them women and children – were later ferried to Sicily and then taken on buses to a refugee centre.
“There are no more controls on the Libyan coast now. Thousands are leaving,” a 26-year-old Eritrean woman rescued from one of the boats and taken to Lampedusa for medical checks said in an interview with TG5 television news.
As they disembarked at Porto Empedocle in Sicily, the weariness of the long journey across the Mediterranean was etched on their faces.
“Most of them are okay healthwise but there’s a pregnant woman on board who was bleeding. There is little organisation,” Bartolo Moretti, a freelance journalist who was travelling with the migrants, told AFP at the port.
An Ethiopian woman gave birth at sea on Saturday and was evacuated with her newborn baby from the refugee boat by an Italian navy helicopter.
A second pregnant woman was rescued and hospitalised but had a miscarriage.
The ANSA news agency quoted migrants from a fourth boat saying they had left Libya and were also heading for Italian shores with around 300 people on board.
And Mussie Zerai, an Eritrean Catholic priest in Italy who has been in contact with many of the migrants via satellite phone, said a fifth vessel – a dinghy – with 68 people on board was also headed for Italy.
He said the boat was still close to Libyan shores and running out of fuel.
“Hundreds of lives of refugees fleeing Libya have been saved,” Zerai said in a statement on the website of his immigration campaign group Habeshia.
But he added: “We know there are still many others trapped in Libya.”
“We appeal to the solidarity of the European Union at this dramatic time… to welcome the Eritrean, Ethiopian and Somalian refugees,” he said.
Italy and Libya signed a friendship treaty in 2008 which Italian authorities say led to a 94-percent decrease in illegal immigration to Italy.
But it was heavily criticised by human rights groups for the treatment of migrants.
The Italian government has suspended the treaty and warns it now fears hundreds of thousands of migrants could depart for Italy if Gadhafi’s regime falls. Italy has requested increased assistance from the European Union.
Gadhafi himself has threatened to send “millions” of migrants to Europe.
“Until now the only migrants to arrive in Lampedusa were Tunisians,” Laura Boldrini a spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency UNHCR in Italy, said earlier.
“This is the first boat coming from Libya with people fleeing the military escalation, the vendettas and the retaliation attacks,” she said.
The people from the boat required “international protection”, she added.
Official data released on Sunday showed 18,501 migrants have arrived on Lampedusa so far this year and hundreds more are arriving every day.
Only 27 migrants arrived on Lampedusa over the same period last year.
Local police said there were currently 5,486 migrants on the island – more than the Italian population of the 20-square-kilometre outcrop.
Linosa and Lampedusa, part of the Pelagian Islands archipelago in the Mediterranean, are closer to North Africa than to mainland Italy.
