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Sunday, May 9, 2021

Italy: Lampedusa Is Exploding With Illegal Migrants

 Over 1,500 have landed in past 24 hours

-Corriere della Sera/Ansa


In the past day, well over 1,000 migrants have landed at Lampedusa, Italy. The island is overwhelmed with this problem which promises to get worse in the summer with good weather. The below article from Corriere della Sera was translated by Fousesquawk. We are working on sub-titling a video into English.  

https://www.corriere.it/cronache/21_maggio_09/migranti-lampedusa-mille-sbarcati-poche-ore-e0809628-b0bf-11eb-b5e4-ce48dcf21aca.shtml

Sicily

Migrants, at Lampedusa, 1,200 landings in a few hours. Salvini: "Immediate meeting with Draghi"

Nine consecutive arrivals with "sea carts": Hotspot immediately full and the emergency returns to the island. The mayor is bitter.  "Don't call it an emergency, it was all foreseen". Meloni: "This requires a naval blockade."

by Salvo Toscano

The emergency returns to Lampedusa with 1,200 refugees arriving within a few hours, thanks also to the good weather. And the political polemic is also returning, with the secretary of the League, Matteo Salvini, who calls for the intervention of Premier Draghi. "A meeting with President Draghi is necessary," he says, "with millions of Italians in difficulty, we cannot think about thousands of illegals (already 12,000 landed since the beginning of the year)" The leader of Brothers of Italy, Giorgia Meloni, speaks instead of a naval blockade. "We don't want to get used to this type of news. Illegal immigration will be stopped. The smugglers (must be) stopped and the immigration NGOs who take advantage of the tragedies". "Europe, take action," added instead Alessandro Battilocchio, deputy of Forza Italia and in charge of the Department of Immigration of the blue movement.

The Day

Look at what has happened. In the course of a few hours, more than one thousand migrants have arrived on the island of Pelagie in 9 different waves. The last two between noon and one pm. First, a patrol boat of the Captain of the Port brought 97 migrants to the Commercial pier, of various ethnicities, all men, intercepted two nautical miles from Lampedusa on a wooden boat, 10 meters long, with an outboard motor. Less than one hour later, a patrol boat of the Guardia di Finanza escorted 38 Tunisian migrants to pier Favaloro, including two women and a child, who were found on a wooden boat of about 8 meters. In the 5th of seven disembarkations brought to Favaloro pier, 398 migrants of various nationalities, of whom were 24 women and 6 children who were found on a broken-down fishing boat  

The Reactions

"Alarming situations," says Nicola Molteni, undersecretary of Interior today at Agrigento for the beatification of Rosario Livatino, who asks for "a European response, totally absent today." All the migrants have been taken to the hotspot of the island, which was empty and has rapidly been refilled to the limit. "I heard from the Ministry of Interior, and they told me that the quarantine ships have left," the mayor of Lampedusa, Toto Martello says to Corriere (della Sera). "Just one thing: Let's don't talk about this thing as if it were an emergency, it is not, it was all foreseen and predictable."





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