ROME – A boat carrying 760 people, most of them from sub-Saharan Africa, arrived on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa from Libya yesterday, authorities said, in the continuing North African immigration crisis.
The boatload was one of the largest to arrive in years on the tiny island, located about midway between Sicily and Tunisia, which has been at the centre of an immigration crisis triggered by the upheavals in North Africa.
Some 25,000 illegal migrants, most from Tunisia, have arrived in Lampedusa and other southern islands since the start of the year, when previously strict border controls disappeared in the turmoil that has swept the region.
Earlier this month, Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi vowed to clear the island, whose regular population of around 5,000 was at times outnumbered by migrants sleeping in improvised tent encampments on hillsides and beaches.
Hundreds of new arrivals have followed those shipped off the island to reception centres on the Italian mainland.
Medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières said in a statement that most of those who arrived yesterday had suffered badly during the three-day voyage from Tripoli.
Among the 760, it said there were 63 women, many of whom were pregnant, and seven children.
“The migrants, in the overwhelming majority from sub-Saharan Africa, presented symptoms of hypothermia, shock and severe exhaustion due to the conditions of the voyage,” it said.
Earlier this month, up to 250 people are believed to have drowned after their overcrowded boat capsized and sank in Maltese waters.
Italian authorities have reached an accord with Tunis to try to stop the flow of illegal migrants from Tunisia, most of them young men seeking work in France.
Officials remain deeply concerned there may be a separate influx of refugees trying to escape the fighting in Libya. – (Reuters)