In a particularly risky operation, two helicopters battled against strong winds to bring to safety, one by one, the migrants, including a child and two pregnant women, who had been stranded for almost two days on a steep and rocky reef on the small island. from Lampedusa. Firefighters said all the migrants, who had clung to the rocks after their boat hit the reef overnight Friday, had been saved.
For years, migrants have boarded unseaworthy smuggling boats to make the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean Sea and try to reach the shores of southern Europe, hoping to be granted asylum or to find family or work, especially in northern European countries.
In all, the 34 migrants who had been stranded on the reef for two nights were rescued, said Federico Catania, a spokesman for the alpine rescue group whose experts were lowered from an Italian air force helicopter hovering over the reef.
The migrants, some wearing shorts and flip-flops, clung to their rescuers as they were loaded onto the helicopter. A fire brigade helicopter also carried out some of the rescues.
The two women, one of them late in pregnancy, were examined by medical personnel, said Maria Ylenia Di Paola, a nurse in Lampedusa. She told Italian state television that the women were dehydrated and cold, “but above all they receive psychological care.”
The helicopter operation was launched after the coast guard determined that rough seas would make it impossible for rescue boats to safely approach the craggy rocks. A day earlier, Italian rescuers from helicopters had dropped food, water and thermal blankets at the migrants on the reef.
Meanwhile, survivors of two boats that capsized on Saturday about 42.5 kilometers (23 nautical miles) southwest of Lampedusa told rescuers that about 30 fellow migrants were missing. The Coast Guard reported that in two operations it had saved 57 immigrants and recovered the bodies of a child and a woman.
Coast guardsmen lowered a wide rope ladder and helped load the migrants onto their rescue craft, tossed and tossed by windswept waves. At least one coast guard diver jumped into the sea to help guide a raft, launched into the Mediterranean by rescuers, so that survivors could hold on to it as it was pulled toward the vessel, according to details obtained from coast guard video of the rescue.
Before the two bodies were recovered on Saturday, a total of 1,814 migrants were known to have perished in 2023 trying to cross the Mediterranean into Italy in boats launched from Tunisia or Libya, according to Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the IOM, the agency of the UN for migrations.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
