Two rescues of migrants in the central Mediterranean, one of 26 and the other of 31 people, took place today after hours of alarms and searches at sea. One was completed by the Geo Barents, the Doctors Without Borders ship that had already rescued 80 people yesterday, the other was completed by a French merchant ship sent to the area together with other commercial ships and, ironically, the yacht of a Russian tycoon.
The 26 migrants, who left Libya, were on a small boat in distress, between the SAR areas of Libya and Malta. Since yesterday Alarm Phone, the “migrant switchboard”, asked for a quick intervention as the boat was “adrift and exposed to very high waves”. Some ships were sent to the site during the night, including the Italian cargo Magnifica, the French container port Rivoli and, as announced by Sergio Scandura of Radio Radicale who constantly follows the movements at sea and in the sky in the Mediterranean area, the Quantum Blue mega yacht of the Russian oligarch Sergey Galitsky, who left Monte Carlo on 3 March probably to escape international sanctions, and “diverted” to the boat of migrants, it is not yet clear by which maritime authority. The 26 were recovered in the late morning by the crew of the container port “Cma Cgm Rivoli” coming from the Suez Canal, and will now have to be brought ashore, probably in Sicily given the route the ship was following.
Hours earlier, during the night, MSF’s Geo Barents had carried out «a difficult rescue in the Maltese search and rescue area – as announced by the NGO itself -. After 6 hours of searching in the dark and with adverse weather conditions, we finally reached an unstable boat with 31 terrified people on board ». «The boat was already taking on water – said Caroline Willemen, coordinator of the MSF project on board the NGO ship – and she capsized while people were still on board. We were able to save them all, but what would have happened if we had arrived a few hours later? ».
These migrants also departed from Libya, like the 80 that Geo Barents had taken on board yesterday and like the 28 rescued, also yesterday, by the Open Arms of the Catalan NGO of the same name. In Libya, where the political situation is always very complex, today hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers have “peacefully demonstrated” in front of the UNHCR headquarters where already in recent months there have been numerous and prolonged protests and always for the same reason. The NGO “Refugees in Libya” gave the news with a series of tweets: “They protest because most of them spent 5 years waiting for asylum and many of them spent 3 years in Zintan prison and why they didn’t they feel they are neither listened to nor protected ». To the NGO members, they said: “We are human beings like our brothers who are fighting for the freedom of Ukraine”.
