The search for missing migrants off southern Sardinia continued on Monday, after a body was recovered Saturday night near Sant’Antioco. A day earlier, a rescued migrant reported he had been shipwrecked with eight others.
Patrol boats and a helicopter of the Finance Guard, together with Coast Guard patrol boats, were searching the coast in the area of Sant'Antioco, in the south-west of Sardinia, looking for traces of the shipwrecked persons.
The search began after a plane of the Finance Police Force identified a lifeless body at sea last Saturday (August 9).
The body was later recovered by the Port Authority, while the day before, the Finance Guard had rescued one of the migrants. He is the one who stated he had been shipwrecked with another eight persons as they were trying to reach the coasts of Sardinia.
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34 migrants arrived in Sardinia, new arrivals also in Lampedusa
In the last days, 34 migrants reached Sardinia via sea. Nine arrived late evening on Sunday in Sant'Antioco, another 12 had been intercepted during the day by the Carabinieri on the beach of Porto Pino, in the Municipality of Sant'Anna Arresi, and, just slightly before, another 13 had reached the port of Teulada. All the migrants were taken to the shelter center of Monastir, in the province of Cagliari.
The arrivals are also continuing in Lampedusa.
On Sunday, 58 migrants reached the island, among them 2 minors, after the 10-meter dinghy they were travelling on was rescued by Frontex and Finance Guard patrol boats. They are Egyptian, Eritrean, Syrian, and Iranian, and said they set sail from the port of Zuwara, in Libya, at 2 am between Saturday and Sunday.
They were all taken to the hotspot of Contrada Imbriacola. The hotspot was empty after the transfer by ferry to Port Empedocle of 173 guests on Saturday night.
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146 migrants arrived in Savona following their rescue by the NGO Emergency
On Sunday evening in the port of Savona, in the region of Liguria, 146 migrants arrived after being rescued by the ship Life Support, the search and rescue boat of the NGO Emergency, in the Central Mediterranean.
Between Wednesday, August 6, and Thursday, August 7, the ship belonging to Emergency conducted three separate emergency rescues.
The first two involved overcrowded, unseaworthy rubber dinghies carrying people in precarious condition: one with 31 people — including a pregnant woman and 11 unaccompanied minors — and another with 47 people without life jackets, including three minors.
The third rescue involved 69 people aboard an overcrowded fiberglass boat that approached the Life Support at high speed, coming dangerously close as those steering the vessel urged passengers to jump aboard the NGO ship. Some migrants fell into the water during the attempt; none were wearing life jackets. According to Emergency, the operation was particularly challenging.
One of the migrants was evacuated by helicopter by the Coast Guard because he was in critical medical condition.
Those rescued in the three operations included people from Sudan — a country at war for more than two years — as well as Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Eritrea, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Nigeria, Senegal, and Somalia, all nations affected by violence, poverty, political instability, and climate change.
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