The bodies of eight migrants, including a pregnant woman, were found on board a boat rescued by the Italian Coast Guard in the Mediterranean, Filippo Mannino, mayor of Lampedusa island, told AFP on Friday.
The Coast Guard Thursday evening “recovered eight bodies, five men and three women, one of whom was pregnant. There are 42 survivors, including two pregnant women,” Mannino said.
“I stopped counting the dead. I’ve been mayor for six months and have already received at least 40 deaths. That’s not normal, we recover bodies almost every week,” he lamented.
The island of Lampedusa is a 20 km2 rocky outcrop located about a hundred kilometers east of the Tunisian coast in the heart of the Mediterranean Sea and represents the first gateway to Europe for migrants arriving from North Africa.
Italy has been one of the main gateways for sea immigration from Africa to Europe for years, with a record 180,000 arrivals in 2016.
Around 105,000 migrants arrived in Italy in 2022 and nearly 5,000 since the beginning of the year, a number that has risen sharply compared to the same period the previous two years, the Interior Ministry website shows
The issue of immigration and the management of migrant flows will be on the agenda of the next extraordinary European Union summit, scheduled for February 9th and 10th.
“The situation is getting really dramatic. Europe has to do something, the government has to do something,” stressed the Mayor of Lampedusa.
Italy, led by the right-wing government of Giorgia Meloni since October, has been fighting migrant arrivals by all means and has insisted on putting the issue on the summit’s agenda in a bid to garner more support from other EU countries.
slow down arrivals
In particular, Rome hopes for an automatic redistribution of migrants arriving on its territory, an idea that has met with strong resistance in many EU countries.
In a bid to at least stem the arrivals, the government passed a new restrictive law in early January on the activities of NGOs rescuing migrants at sea.
The ships of these NGOs must therefore inform the Italian authorities as soon as they have rescued a boat, who then decide in which port survivors and rescuers must dock.
It is often a far port from the rescue site.
In this way, NGOs cannot rescue multiple boats in multiple missions and lose a lot of time navigating to the assigned ports and returning to the high seas.
This law has also been criticized by several bodies of the Council of Europe.