Migrants gathered in the Mediterranean by the humanitarian ship Open Arms landed in the night of Tuesday to Wednesday on the Italian island of Lampedusa, pursuant to a court decision taken given the high tensions on board after days of over- Place a few cables from the coast. After an inspection of the judicial police and two doctors, the Agrigento prosecutor, Luigi Patronaggio, decided that the survivors had to be landed on the small Italian island, even though Spain had just had a military ship fitted out for the first time. recover. The prosecutor ordered the sequestration of the Open Arms, the Spanish humanitarian organization of the same name. The announcement of the landing sparked explosions of joy on the boat.
Videos broadcast by people on board showed migrants and rescuers kissing and applauding. A journalist from the daily El Pais in Lampedusa said that some on board sang the song of revolt by Italian partisans "Bella Ciao" as the ship entered the port. After walking down the bridge one by one, sometimes in limbo, and undergoing a brief medical check-up, the migrants were taken to a pick-up center in a van, she testified.
Nineteen days on board
The endless wait on the nearby coast, which began on Thursday, provoked desperate gestures from the migrants crammed aboard the ship. Tuesday, fifteen of them, some without life jackets, had flung themselves overboard trying to swim to Lampedusa. According to a spokesman for the NGO, they were "rescued" by the Italian coastguard and brought to the island.
The Open Arms had 147 migrants on board near Lampedusa on Thursday, and just over 80 after the evacuation to the island of several people having jumped on the water Tuesday and dozens of miners or sick the last days. Stationed since Thursday a few hundred meters from the coast of Lampedusa, these migrants were denied access to the island by the Italian authorities, although six European countries (France, Germany, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania and Spain) have committed to welcoming them. Some of these migrants rescued off the coast of Libya by the NGO spent 19 days on board, matching the record of migrants rescued by the SeaWatch3 in late December before landing in Malta on 9 January.