The Italian navy yesterday rescued more than 1,100 migrants from nine large rafts in the waters south of Sicily, the latest arrivals from North Africa.
Patrol helicopters identified the overcrowded rafts on Wednesday and four navy vessels participated in the rescue which ended early yesterday, a statement said. The navy gave no details about the nationalities of the migrants.
Meanwhile seven people drowned yesterday when a group of 200 migrants tried to swim across to Morocco’s Spanish enclave of Ceuta from the Moroccan territories around it, the country’s interior ministry said.
Spain has two enclaves in Morocco, Ceuta and Mellila, and hundreds of African migrants try regularly to enter them either by swimming along the coast or climbing the triple walls that separate them from Morocco.
“Local authorities of M’diq and Fnideq towns said around 200 illegal migrants tried to cross, by swimming, to the occu-pied enclave of Ceuta,” a ministry statement said. “Seven bodies, including one woman, have been recovered.”
Patrol helicopters identified overcrowded rafts
The ministry said 150 migrants of the 200 had been stopped in the water and 13 were injured and treated in the hospital in Fnideq.
Every year thousands of African migrants try to reach the European coast, and there are rescues and drownings almost every week off Morocco.
Last Sunday, Moroccan authorities said they recovered five bodies of African migrants off the coast of the northern town of Nador, four of them from Senegal.
Apart from Spain, Italy is a major gateway into Europe for migrants, and sea arrivals more than tripled in 2013 from the previous year, fuelled by Syria’s civil war and strife in the Horn of Africa.
In October, 366 Eritreans drowned in a shipwreck near the shore of the Italian island of Lampedusa, which is located about halfway between Sicily and Tunisia. More than 200, mostly Syrians, died in another shipwreck a week later.
Over the past two decades, Italy, Greece and the Mediterranean island of Malta have borne the brunt of migrant flows and have urged the EU to make a more robust and coordinated response.