ROME (AP) – A Spanish-flagged humanitarian vessel on Sunday sought a haven for 265 migrants that its crew rescued from the Mediterranean Sea in recent days.
The charity Open Arms tweeted that its ship on Saturday safely brought 96 migrants aboard aboard a wooden boat without a life jacket in international waters. According to the agency, the passengers, most of them from Eritrea, are two women and 17 minors and suffer from hypothermia.
In a separate operation, two days before the rescue, Open Arms took 169 migrants on board who had left the coast of Libya, where many human traffickers are based.
Traffickers launch ships, many of them fragile rubber boats or fragile fishing boats, full of migrants waiting to reach the European coast in search of asylum. Some are fleeing conflict or persecution, but many of the hundreds of thousands of migrants rescued at sea in recent years are fleeing poverty and are therefore not granted asylum by European Union countries.
Italy and Malta, also an EU country, have often refused permission to dock humanitarian rescue boats, claiming that most migrants want to find jobs or relatives in northern Europe. Italian and Maltese government officials have insisted that other European nations do their part.