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Italy continues struggle with migrants issue

22 July 2014 18:43 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. Italian police on Tuesday detained five alleged human traffickers on charges of having killed dozens of migrants in the recent deadly crossing to Italy on Saturday, APA reports quoting Xinhua.

According to Adnkronos news agency, some of the 561 survivors mainly from Syria, Pakistan, Nigeria and Ghana said many fellow travelers were stabbed or beaten to death during the crossing and then thrown into the sea by the five arrested.

The packed boat was rescued by Italian and Maltese ships some 150 kilometers off Italy's Lampedusa, a small island south of Sicily which is far closer to Africa than to the Italian mainland.

A total of 28 migrants were found dead in the hold of the ship where they were allegedly suffocated by damps from the boat's old engine. One more migrant died while being rushed to a hospital, and a small child died later while being carried to Sicily.

"There were 750 people on that boat. The others died when a merchant ship -- which was the first to give the alarm -- approached us. There were many children among them," one of the survivors was quoted as saying by la Repubblica, one of Italy's leading newspapers.

"Many of the black people who were in the hold were killed by other black people who did not want to let them go out as there was no space left on deck," a 40-year-old Syrian national said according to the newspaper.

"Every centimeter of that boat was occupied by us who were piled like beasts, one above the other, including many children and also my one-year-old son Mohamed," he said. "My wife and I had escaped from Syria to especially give a future to Mohamed, but everything was useless. Our child died," the man concluded.

Italian media said later on Tuesday that more than 1,100 migrants were rescued in the past hours by the navy ships that are part of the Italian government's Mare Nostrum (Our Sea) search-and-rescue mission, and were being transported to the Italian mainland.

Over the last few days thousands of migrants have arrived to Italy, considered by the asylum seekers a point of entry to move on to other European countries, adding to the more than 67,000 who have reached the Mediterranean country since the beginning of 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The continuously rising influx, which has caused more than 500 deaths since the start of the year according to the UN estimates, has strongly damaged the economy of Italy's southern islands which especially live on tourism.

In an interview with Rai state television on Tuesday, the local head in Lampedusa of national hotel association Federalberghi, Giandamiano Lombardo, called on the government to properly cope with the unsustainable emergency that has caused the "collapse" of the local economy.

"Tourists are not coming here anymore as they see Lampedusa as a place full of migrants, sorrow and desperation," he said. "Some 90 percent of our island's economy is based on tourism, and entrepreneurs are doing their utmost to face this problem, but there is no way for us to deal with it," he pointed out.

Presenting his country's priorities during the ongoing rotating presidency of the European semester, Italian Interior Minister Angelino Alfano said in Brussels on Tuesday that the European border agency Frontex should be strengthened in terms of human and financial resources "with the perspective of Mare Nostrum's absorption in a European framework."

The Italian government, which is spending a monthly budget of as many as 9 million euros (12 million U.S. dollars) for the Mare Nostrum mission, has repeatedly called for help from other European countries in dealing with the migrant issue, but little progress has been made so far.