Nearly 50 boats arrived between Friday night and Saturday on the island of Lampedusa off Sicily, according to state radio and other Italian media. Other boats carrying migrants reached Pantelleria, another tiny island favored by holidaymakers. Hundreds of migrants have come ashore from the virtual flotilla of smugglers’ boats to these islands. Many of the ships launched by migrant smugglers carried as few as eight passengers. But others had about 100 passengers, many of them from Tunisia, according to reports. Migrants rescued at sea near the Italian island of Lampedusa in the Mediterranean Sea on August 27, 2022.AP Photo/Jeremias Gonzalez Other boats reached the coast of mainland Italy on Saturday, either unaided or with the help of Italian coast guard vessels. Italy’s ANSA news agency reported that 92 migrants, most of them from Afghanistan, arrived in Puglia – the “heel” of the boot-shaped peninsula – by sailboat on Saturday. Still more migrants sailed to Calabria on the “leg” of the peninsula, while other boats arrived in Sicily and Sardinia, Italy’s two largest islands, in the past two days. In Sardinia, the Carabinieri paramilitary police spotted 29 migrants walking along a road, ANSA reported. Many of the migrants arriving in Italy are reportedly Tunisian.AP Photo/Jeremias Gonzalez The humanitarian organization Doctors Without Borders tweeted that one of its rescue ships, the Geo Barents, rescued 25 migrants, including five minors, from a small boat in distress in international waters near Libya on Saturday night. Geo Barents had already lured other migrants abroad in other rescue operations, the group said. With hundreds of migrants disembarking from boats in recent days, the residence temporarily housing rescued migrants in Lampedusa quickly became overcrowded. Corriere della Sera said the residence housed 1,500 asylum seekers, almost four times its capacity. Interior ministry authorities arranged for a commercial passenger ship to sail from Sicily to Lampedusa, where it was expected to arrive on Sunday night, to take 250 migrants on board and transfer them to Sicilian migrant housing to ease overcrowding at facilities on the small island. . While hundreds of thousands of migrants have sailed off the coast of Libya on smugglers’ boats in recent decades, many also set out from Tunisia. Italian media noted that the Tunisian coast guard prevented at least several attempts by ships full of migrants to head for Italy and rescued many others from boats in danger on Friday and Saturday.
