An Armed Forces of Malta patrol boat escorted a boatload of Eritrean migrants to Lampedusa in the early hours of yesterday morning after providing them with basic supplies.
The incident bears strong similarities to another that happened last week in which five Eritrean migrants on a dinghy were accompanied to the Italian island by the AFM, who said the migrants refused to be rescued.
An AFM spokesman said the new migrants also refused to be brought to Malta and accordingly the soldiers provided them with food, water and life jackets.
The maritime squadron's actions are in line with a Cabinet decision taken in April empowering the armed forces to supply migrants' boats with the necessary supplies to continue on their onward journey if they are not in danger of drowning.
The Italian authorities have accused Malta of denying rescue to the five migrants that made it to Lampedusa last week, a charge strenuously denied by the government and the AFM.
The white dinghy involved in this week's incident was first spotted by a fishing boat on Monday evening, southwest of Malta. A patrol boat on routine patrols as part of the Frontex mission was immediately dispatched to the area. The 57 migrants on board, who included five women, "looked healthy" and were proceeding towards Lampedusa, according to the army. The patrol boat accompanied the dinghy on its journey.
At about 3.50 a.m. yesterday, Malta informed the Italian rescue coordination centre in Rome about the Eritreans and some three hours later, when the dinghy was just 14 miles off Lampedusa, a Guardia di Finanza boat arrived and continued escorting the migrants to shore.
The AFM does not have video footage of the event as alleged by some Italian news reports but the spokesman confirmed it had photographs of the moment the Italian boat took over.
The photos would not be released as they were confidentially passed on to Frontex, he said.
The latest incident comes in the middle of a political storm in Italy over migration.
While Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini has questioned the Maltese actions on the high seas, insisting Malta gives up its large search and rescue area, his government has been getting flak from the opposition over the hard-line immigration laws introduced earlier this year.
At the same time, the rightist Lega Nord, which forms part of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's government, is at loggerheads with the Vatican after Italian bishops denounced the migration policies introduced by his government.