In less than 48 hours, nearly 2,000 migrants, mainly from the coasts of Tunisia, in the midst of an economic, political and social crisis, but also from Libya, landed in Sicily.
With our correspondent in Rome, Anne Le Nir
With the return of sunny days, Italy is facing new and particularly significant migratory flows. Since the beginning of the year, more than 28,000 migrants have landed in the south of the country compared to less than 7,000 in 2022.
On Monday evening, the Italian Coast Guard, aided by Frontex air assets and two merchant ships, managed to overcome the difficulties to rescue, in the territorial waters under their jurisdiction, 1,200 people crammed into two fishing boats: first a drifting boat with 800 migrants on board which left Cyrenaica, then another makeshift boat, carrying 400 people, also part of Libya and heading for Calabria.
THE hot spot of Lampedusa currently hosts four times more migrants than its reception capacity, which is 400 places.
But transfers to other reception centers on the peninsula are slow.
This drives the mayor of the small island, Filippo Mannino, to despair, who wrote to Pope Francis to express his pain and bitterness at the recent fatal shipwrecks in the Mediterranean.