At sea for five days, including two days without water or food, these survivors were exhausted and largely dehydrated.
Three rescues in just seven hours. Ocean Viking, the ambulance ship of SOS Méditerranée, rescued 153 migrants on Friday in the central Mediterranean, in the Maltese search area, AFP learned from the NGO on Saturday.
Exhausted and dehydrated
These search and rescue operations, triggered after an alert via Alarm Phone, a telephone line for people in distress at sea managed by an NGO, were “closely coordinated by the Italian maritime authorities”, welcomed the association. humanitarian organization based in Marseille, recalling that “SOS Méditerranée has been calling for such vital coordination efforts for years”.
These three rescues successively saved 59 people and then 65 people on board two wooden boats, three hours apart. Then 29 people in distress from a fiberglass boat were rescued.
At sea for five days, including two days without water or food, these survivors were exhausted and largely dehydrated, according to SOS Méditerranée.
Already 824 dead in the Mediterranean in 2023
With the 15 migrants rescued on Thursday, it is therefore with 168 survivors in total, including seven women, four children and around twenty unaccompanied minors, that the Ocean Viking is now heading for Civitavecchia, the safe port designated for it. by the Italian authorities, 942 km away, i.e. three days of navigation.
Even though many rescues take place in the Maltese search area, the Maltese authorities never respond to requests for assistance from humanitarian NGOs helping migrants, and in particular SOS Méditerranée, and it is ultimately the Italian authorities who usually point them to a safe harbor.
But Italy’s practice of assigning very distant ports to sea rescue NGOs was denounced at the beginning of January by several international NGOs, which considered that it was in fact “to hinder assistance to people in distress” by causing them to waste a lot of time and therefore de facto reducing their ability to help.
The central Mediterranean is the most dangerous migration route in the world, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The UN agency estimates that in 2022, 1,417 migrants disappeared there. This figure is already 824 since the beginning of 2023.
