The rescue ship wrecked migrants SOS-Mediterranean and Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), the Ocean Viking, will be operational "during the month of August" in the central Mediterranean, said organizations Monday in Paris.
"For seven months, we worked hard to find a ship ... It was long and difficult to find a shipowner who supports us and a flag that respects maritime conventions," said Frederic Penard, director of operations of SOS-Mediterranean, at a press conference.
Four rescue channels
The Ocean Viking, which is 69 meters long and 15 meters wide and built in 1986 for assistance to oil rigs in the North Sea, will be able to accommodate 200 to 300 castaways and even more during a tight period. he said.
It has a crew of nine, plus a team of 10 people from SOS-Mediterranean and MSF medical staff including a doctor, two nurses and a midwife, more than thirty people on board in total. Four semi-rigid rescue channels, a "hospital", accommodation, storage space and a landing platform for the canals will be installed on board.
"The medical procedures on the boat will go from childbirth to the resuscitation of people, they are situations of life and death and not a kind of cruise," said Hassiba Hadj-Sahraoui, head of MSF.
The ship "will not bring back anyone to Libya"
Flying the Norwegian flag, the Ocean Viking is heading since Thursday evening "towards the Mediterranean to conduct a new campaign of research and relief in the central Mediterranean" - became the deadliest migratory maritime route in the world, announced Sunday SOS-Mediterranean , who assured that the ship "will not bring back anyone to Libya".
"We are going back to sea because people are dying, there is human suffering on an industrial scale," said MSF President Joanne Liu, who says that states have a "deadly logic" in trying to "make rescuers disappear" and proposing as "solutions" to migrants, "drowning or returning to Libya".
After nearly three years at sea, the Aquarius, the former SOS-Mediterranean building that rescued 30,000 wrecked migrants, was forced to cease operations in December 2018, successively deprived of its flag of Gibraltar and Panama.