The small Italian island of Lampedusa has once again been the destination for the migrant barges that cross the Mediterranean after receiving more than 1,300 people in the last twenty-four hours, a number that has once again saturated its reception capacity.
In total, some 1,400 migrants remain in the reception center of its port, completely saturated since its capacity is only 400, which is why some migrants are being transferred on board ships to Porto Empedocle, on the island of Sicily, reports Eph.
During the early hours of Sunday, the Italian Port Authority transferred more than 349 migrants, who will be distributed in the shelters of Catania, Syracuse and Agrigento, while five boats arrived in Lampedusa with a total of 338 migrants.
Meanwhile, and far from the coast, the ships managed by the NGOs continue to rescue barges and small boats that fail to reach the main port, leaving them stranded in the middle of the Mediterranean.
The ship of the German NGO Resqship found a wooden fishing boat on Sunday morning, saturated with about 130 people on board who jumped into the water as soon as they saw the humanitarian ship.
"People had been adrift on the high seas for 3 days and the engine was not working. Due to the high waves, the situation became increasingly dangerous and people panicked," Resqship reported on its social networks, which managed to save to all passengers with the help of the Italian Coast Guard.
Good weather and improved sailing conditions have prompted more ships to set sail from North Africa, just two weeks after Lampedusa posted record arrivals of 3,000 people in 48 hours in mid-April.
After this registration, the Italian government, chaired by the far-right Giorgia Meloni, decreed a state of national immigration emergency for the next six months and which, among other powers, expedites the repatriation of migrants.
For their part, the Italian media collected information from the Tunisian Coast Guard, which claims to have prevented at least twenty boats from sailing north, thus having rescued more than 800 people.
In the first four months of 2023, more than four times as many people arrived in Italy as the previous year: 40,856 people compared to 10,188 in 2022, according to the latest official data from the Italian Ministry of the Interior.
