The Ezadeen, a merchant ship with 450 migrants on board, off the southern coast of Italy, near Crotone, on Friday. Credit Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
By ALAN COWELL
Friday, January 02, 2015
For the second time in three days, the Italian authorities scrambled on Friday to rescue hundreds of migrants aboard an aging freighter in rough seas near the Italian mainland after its crew abandoned it.
The use of larger vessels seems to mark a new tactic by traffickers in the Mediterranean, seeking ever greater profits from people desperate to flee war zones, chaos and repressive regimes and prepared to pay thousands a dollars each to do so.
“We are aware of at least four incidents in the last two months where people smugglers cram hundreds of migrants and refugees in big cargo boats and then send them uncrewed in the direction of Italy,” said William Spindler, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency.
“In the past they did exactly the same thing with smaller vessels like fishing vessels and dinghies,” he told BBC radio. “But it seems now they are going for bigger boats like cargo boasts,” and “the money involved is huge.”
The danger, he said, was that, with no one at the tiller, the vessels could “crash against the coast, and many lives will be lost.”
The latest drama came in high seas and adverse weather as the Ezadeen, a 50-year-old livestock carrier sailing under the flag of Sierra Leone, headed for the coast of southeastern Italy with 450 people on board — the second such eipisode in a week. Some reports said it had run out of fuel, along with supplies of food, water and milk for migrants who included pregnant women and dozens of children.
“When we hailed the ship to ask about its status, a migrant woman responded, saying, ‘We are alone, and we have no one to help us,’ ” said Cmdr. Filippo Marini, an Italian Coast Guard spokesman, according to Reuters.
Abandoned by its crew, the vessel had been put on a collision course for the Italian coast but then ran out of fuel, he was quoted as saying.
The first rescue vessel to come to the aid of the stricken Ezadeen was an Icelandic patrol boat sailing as part of a program coordinated by Frontex, the European border agency. But the seas were too rough for rescuers to cross from one vessel to the other, and an Italian helicopter was called in.
“Because of the difficult weather conditions, the ship can only be boarded from the air,” the Italian Air Force said in a statement.
After several hours of effort in rough seas, the Icelandic Coast Guard ship took the Ezadeen under tow, Commander Marini said.
Children and pregnant women were among the migrants, most of whom were believed to be Syrian, Commander Marini told The Associated Press. Other Italian officials said the vessel had apparently run out of food and water and had been at sea for up to six days, its passage slowed by bad weather.
Some analysts said that the change in the traffickers’ tactics had occurred since Italy phased out an ambitious and costly search-and-rescue operation called Mare Nostrum, which located and rescued dozens of smaller boats used by migrants. That program covered a much wider area of the Mediterranean than the replacement coordinated by Frontex.
In a posting on Twitter, the Italian Coast Guard said the vessel was being towed in toward the coastal town of Corigliano Calabro. It was expected to arrive there around midnight local time.
The 240-foot-long vessel had apparently veered off its original stated course to southern France from the island of Cyprus, according to Agence France-Presse. Other reports said it had initially set sail from the Syrian port of Tartus or from Turkey.
With record numbers of migrants heading toward Italy, the rescue unfolded just days after the Italian authorities boarded a freighter, the Moldovan-registered Blue Sky M, carrying more than 700 people, many of them fleeing Syria’s civil war. That vessel also seemed to have been abandoned by its crew after setting out from Turkey.
Italian officers were lowered onto the Blue Sky M to bring it under control and to prevent it from crashing into the rocky coastline.
Last month, the United Nations refugee agency said that over 200,000 refugees and migrants had arrived in European countries in 2014, compared with 60,000 in 2013. A large majority of them — 160,000 — were seeking refuge in Italy. Almost half the migrants were citizens of Syria and Eritrea, in the Horn of Africa.
Source: New York Times