Italian justice ordered Tuesday, August 20, the landing in Lampedusa, Sicily, dozens of migrants collected by the Spanish NGO Proactiva Open Arms and the sequestration of his ship, AFP learned from judicial sources.
The prosecutor of Agrigento, Luigi Patronaggio, after an inspection of the judicial police and two doctors, decided that given the difficult situation on board, the survivors were to be disembarked in the next hours on the small Sicilian island.
The prosecutor also took the decision to pre-sequester the humanitarian ship, in the course of an investigation against X for kidnapping of persons, omission and refusal of official acts, which Minister of the Interior Matteo Salvini said, on Facebook, that it targets him directly.
"If anyone thinks to scare me with the umpteenth complaint and request for a trial, he is mistaken: it would be a joke to have managed to convince Spain to send a ship (to recover migrants) and now to to work to land them in Italy and to try the Minister of the Interior who continues to defend the borders of the country, "he said on Facebook.
On board since 19 days for some
This Italian court decision comes shortly after Madrid's decision, which announced Tuesday afternoon sending a military ship to Lampedusa to recover dozens of people aboard the boat, many of whom threw themselves into the water in a desperate gesture to rally the Italian island to swimming.
Stationed since Thursday a few hundred meters from the coast of the Italian island, these migrants rescued by the Proactiva Open Arms NGO off the coast of Libya have been denied access to Lampedusa by the Italian authorities, even if six European countries - France, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania and Spain - have committed to welcoming them.
The 15 migrants who threw themselves into the sea, some without life vests, attempting to swim to Lampedusa, were "rescued" by the Italian coast guards and brought to the island, according to a spokesman for long.
"The situation is out of control," Proactiva said on Twitter, whose boat now houses a little less than 100 migrants while dozens of miners or patients have already been evacuated.
Some of these migrants have been on board the Open Arms for 19 days, matching the record of migrants rescued by Sea-Watch 3 at the end of December before landing in Malta on 9 January.
With AFP