The authorities in Italy have struggled on Sunday to relieve overcrowding in shelters following scores of vessels carrying over 1,000 migrants have reached the southern shores of Italy and two of its tiny islands over the weekend.
As per local media reports, “Around 50 boats have reached between Friday night and Saturday on Lampedusa island off Sicily. Other vessels carrying migrants reached Pantelleria, another tiny island favoured by vacationers.
Over hundreds of migrants have stepped ashore from the virtual flotilla of smugglers’ vessels on those islands. Several of the vessels, which were launched by migrant smugglers held as few as eight passengers. But others had around 100 passengers aboard, the majority of them from Tunisia, as per the reports.
Other vessels have landed on the shores of the Italian mainland on Saturday, either unaided or assisted by Italian coast guard ships.
As per reports, around 92 migrants, most of them from Afghanistan, reached Puglia- the “heel” of the boot-shaped peninsula-in a sailboat on Saturday. Still other migrants who has sailed to Calabria in the “toe” of the peninsula, while other boats reached Sicily and Sardinia, Carabinieri paramilitary police have spotted 29 migrants walking along a road.
The humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders have took it to Twitter, stated that one of its rescue ships, Geo Barents, has saved around 25 migrants, including five minors, from a small vessel in distress in international waters, which is near to Libya on Saturday night.
The group added that, Geo Barents already had other migrants abroad plucked to safety in other rescue operations.
With the disembarkation of over hundreds of migrants from vessels in the last days, the residence temporarily housing has rescued migrants on Lampedusa quickly became overcrowded. Corriere della Sera stated that the residence housed 1,500 asylum-seekers, around four times its capacity.
The authorities of Interior Ministry arranged for a commercial passenger ferry to sail from Sicily to Lampedusa, where it was expected to reach on night of Sunday, embarks around 250 migrants & then take them to Sicilian migrant residences to lessen crowding on the tiny island’s facility.
While hundreds of thousands of migrants have set sail from Libyan shores aboard smugglers’ boats in the last decades, many also set out from Tunisia.
