Migrants: NGOs concerned about lack of rescue vessels in the Mediterranean

Maltese police officers speak with migrants disembarking from a military ship that arrived in Senglea in the Grand Port of Valletta, Malta on April 10, 2020. REUTERS / Darrin Zammit Lupi

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With the good weather the migrant crossings resume from Libya, the tragedies too. A shipwreck between Tripoli and Malta killed dozens on Sunday, announces the Italian agency Ansa. NGOs worry, there are no more relief vessels in the area, and Malta, Italy and Libya have declared that their ports could no longer be considered "safe harbors" due to the epidemic.

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As of Friday evening the NGO Alarm Phone had notified the surveillance and rescue authorities. She had established contact with four boats, 260 migrants in total in need of assistance, some urgently.

Alerts remained unanswered, says Maurice Stierl, one of the activists of the NGO: “ The Maltese authorities do not cooperate with us at all. Sometimes they don't even take the information we give them on the phone, they hang up on us when we have essential information on the state of people, and they need the GPS positions that we can find if they want to intervene. But we obviously send them all the information by email, so they cannot deny that they have been contacted many times in recent days. "

In the Times of Malta newspaper the army said on Sunday that it was ready to intervene if a boat was in great distress. By the end of the afternoon, the NGO had lost contact with several boats and on the one responding, two people had lost consciousness.

Echoing a tribune signed by many Maltese organizations, the Archbishop of Malta Mgr Scicluna tweeted, " All people in distress in the area of ​​Malta must be rescued, it is a moral and legal obligation to which it is impossible to give up. "

This weekend several boats reached the Italian coast, an inflatable boat even reached the port of Pozzallo in Sicily. Others arrived on the islands of Pantelleria, Linosa and Lampedusa.

► Read also: Off Libya, migrants more than ever suspended

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  • International Migration
  • Malta
  • Libya
  • Italy
  • NGO
  • Coronavirus

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