ROME (AP) – A Spanish-flagged humanitarian ship was looking for a safe haven for 265 migrants on Sunday that its crew rescued from the Mediterranean Sea in recent days.
The charity Open Arms has tweeted that its boat carried 96 migrants on board on Saturday who had been adrift on a wooden boat without life jackets in international waters. The passengers, mostly from Eritrea, were said to have included two women and 17 minors and were suffering from hypothermia.
In a separate operation two days before this rescue, Open Arms embarked 169 migrants, who had left the Libyan coast, where there are many human traffickers.
Traffickers launch boats, many of them light rubber boats or stunted fishing boats, full of migrants waiting to reach European shores to seek asylum. Some are fleeing conflict or persecution, but many of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have been rescued at sea in recent years are fleeing poverty and therefore being denied asylum by European Union countries.
Italy and Malta, another EU nation, have often refused permission to dock humanitarian rescue ships, saying most migrants want to get to work or family in northern Europe. Italian and Maltese government authorities have insisted that other European nations do their part.