More than 1,500 migrants have reached Italian shores since Saturday

More than 1,500 people have arrived in recent hours on the Italian coast, where the security forces have rescued 5 bodies of migrants along with a merchant ship, while the humanitarian ships Sea Watch 3 and Ocean Viking have rescued more than 500 shipwrecked people in the Central Mediterranean.

A drifting fishing boat with 674 people was rescued this Saturday 124 miles from Calabria (south) by a merchant ship

, three Coast Guard patrol boats and a unit from the Guardia di Finanza, who also found 5 bodies on board the boat. lifeless, official sources reported today.

The rescued, many of them in the water, were transferred in a coast guard ship to the ports of Calabria and Sicily (south), after a rescue operation in which a Navy maritime patrol plane also intervened, which made the first sighting, and a Frontex aircraft.

The Coast Guard had previously rescued other immigrants who were in boats in precarious navigation conditions.

In one of the operations, the intervention of a helicopter from the Catania air base was necessary to carry out the medical evacuation of a woman.

In addition,

, mostly Afghans, Pakistanis, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Somalis, Nigerians, Senegalese and Eritreans from Libya

, whose reception center returns to be saturated with more than 1,300 people, when its capacity is for about 350. Just a week ago, the overcrowding and the state of abandonment of the center, with about 2,000 people and mountains of accumulated garbage, led the Italian Navy to send a boat to transfer about 600 migrants to other cities.

The arrivals of barges to the small Italian island, the closest to the African continent, are continuous, sometimes after being intercepted by the Coast Guard, although on many occasions the migrants arrive directly on the beaches of Lampedusa.

"Lampedusa in emergency," said today the leader of the League, the far-right Matteo Salvini, who took advantage of the situation in that center to campaign for the early elections that have been called in the country after the fall of the Government of Mario Draghi.

"On September 25, Italians will finally be able to choose change: security, courage and border control will return," added Salvini, who was already Minister of the Interior in 2018 and who implemented a very tough policy regarding to immigration, which has even led him to be tried for preventing immigrants from landing in the country for weeks.

In addition,

after being alerted by the Alarm Phone, an NGO that receives calls from migrants who encounter problems while sailing in the Central Mediterranean.

"Sea Watch 3 now has 428 people on board, rescued from 4 overcrowded boats in 12 hours yesterday," German NGO Sea Watch International said on Twitter, "who the European Union would rather see killed or illegally dragged to Libya. The deaths and human rights violations are accepted as measures to seal the European fortress. Let's tear down these walls!"

Also

carried out rescue work today "when seeing an overloaded boat in international waters coming from Libya with" 87 people, including 57 unaccompanied minors who were rescued.

None of them had life jackets."

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

Know more

• Libya

• European Union

• mario draghi

• Matteo Salvini

• Italy

• Refugees

• immigration