Migrants: Banksy's ship calls for help after Mediterranean rescue

The Louise-Michel, the ship chartered by street artist Banksy, appealed for help on Friday, August 28. The boat came to the aid of 130 drifting migrants aboard an inflatable boat which was taking on water, the campaign organizers tweeted on the @MVLouiseMichel account.

🔴Alert! #LouiseMichel assisted another 130 people - among them many women & children - and nobody is helping! We are reaching a State of Emergency. We need immediate assistance, @guardiacostiera & @Armed_Forces_MT. We are safeguarding 219 people with a crew of 10. Act #EU, now!

After a first rescue Thursday, the ship now has 219 castaways survivors on board for only ten crew members, they said. It is, due to its overcrowding, unable to move forward, and 33 people are otherwise left on a life raft moored to the boat, they added.

A dead person on the boat

"We need immediate assistance," pleaded the crew of the boat, claiming to have made several distress calls to the Italian and Maltese authorities, without receiving a response.

"There is already one dead person on the boat. The others have fuel burns, they have been at sea for days and now they are left behind in an EU search and rescue area," said they lamented.

According to the Marinetraffic site, the Louise Michel was on Saturday morning motionless at sea about a hundred kilometers south-east of the Italian island of Lampedusa, south of Sicily.

The @MVLouiseMichel Twitter account also posted several photos of an operation to assist Sea-Watch 4, a humanitarian ship of the NGOs Médecins Sans Frontières and Sea-Watch, present in the area since mid-August.

Pia Klemp solicited by Banksy

The most famous living street artist in the world, who regularly addresses the issue of the migration crisis in his works, would not be on board, assures the Guardian. "I'm an artist from UK and I worked on the migrant crisis obviously I can't keep the money. Could you use it to buy a new boat or something?" this message, signed "Banksy".

The captain of the boat is Pia Klemp, a German human rights activist, known to have driven several other rescue vessels, including the Sea-Watch 3. Asked by the artist at the end of 2019, she is still the subject of an investigation by the Italian justice, in particular for "help with illegal immigration".

More than 300 migrants have perished this year attempting the crossing, but the figure could actually be much higher, estimates the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The last ship to return from the central Mediterranean, the Ocean Viking - chartered by SOS Méditerranée - has been immobilized since early July by the Italian authorities "for technical reasons" after having disembarked in Sicily with 180 migrants.

With AFP

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