More than 1,000 migrants sang hymns, danced and clapped as they sailed into Palermo yesterday, along with the corpses of 17 people who did not survive another series of tragedy-tainted rescues in the Mediterranean.
Starting with the sick, women and children, several hundred of the mainly African group were disembarked from the Siem Pilot, a Norwegian ship working for the European borders agency Frontex’s Operation Triton.
In scenes being played out at a number of Italian ports after a busy weekend in waters off Libya, the rest were to stay on board overnight to ease the pressure on pier-side staff processing the new arrivals.
Among those arriving in Sicily were survivors of an incident on Friday morning when a rubber dinghy was attacked by men in a Libyan coastguard speedboat.
The attack, aimed at stealing or reclaiming the outboard engine of the dinghy, resulted in most of the passengers jumping into the water and the dinghy partially deflating.
An unknown number, possibly as many as 25, drowned.
In a separate incident at least 10 people including four children drowned on Saturday morning during a rescue by the Doctors without Borders (MSF) charity’s boat, Dignity One.
Alhaji Kutubu Sankoh, from Sierra Leone, said that the dinghy he had been travelling on had also had its engine taken off it by unknown assailants.
“We don’t know who has taken our machine. So we are on the water, everybody is crying, we just thought everything is over for us, but with God’s grace your people rescued us,” he told AFP.
Sankoh, 20, said he had left his home and begun the perilous journey over land and sea to Europe after his father died of Ebola.
“People stigmatise us so much, our family,” he said while admitting that he would not advise anyone else to make the same journey. “I wouldn’t allow any of my family to use this road to be honest. It’s not easy, it’s very tough.”
An MSF psychological team waited on land to provide counselling for the survivors from the most traumatic incidents at sea.
“Their stories give us nightmares,” the charity said in a Tweet.
Exhaustion and hunger were the most pressing concerns for most on the Siem Pilot.
Despite the fatigue, they were still able to raise a great cheer when informed by the crew that they were within an hour of the Sicilian port.
Modoulamin Camara, 24, said he had left his native Gambia in July and travelled by car to Senegal, then by bus through the vast expanses of Mali and Niger.
“My brother then sent me money and I paid to go to Tripoli (the Libyan capital) in a pick-up truck with 26 other people,” he said.
In Tripoli he paid around $700 to get onboard the leaky boat with more than 150 other people.
“We suffered a lot, there were women in pain who had to be carried off. We left at 7am in the morning and were rescued at 5pm. I thank God I’m alive because too much pain,” he said. “I was beaten from Niger to Libya. I want to stay in Italy. I’m a carpenter but my dream is to play football professionally. I’m really good!”
Buba Ceesaoi, 17, also described himself as a carpenter from the Gambia, said that he had embarked on a boat after two months under the guard of Libyan former police officers in “a big hall” in the town of Sabratha.
“I started working at nine years old, but there is no work so I had to leave,” he said.
The latest arrivals to be processed lifted to more than 153,000 the total number landing in Italy in 2016 – equalling 2015’s full-year tally but still behind a total of around 170,000 registered in 2014.
While the numbers have remained broadly stable, the crossing has become more dangerous, with some 3,700 people known to have died in the Mediterranean this year, according to the UN, the bulk of them on the Italy-Libya route.
The number of unaccompanied children has also risen sharply and pressure has grown on Italy’s overwhelmed reception centres as a result of the country’s neighbours tightening their border controls.

Migrants clash with police and burn down Greek camp offices
Migrants at a camp on the Greek island of Lesbos hurled stones at police and torched temporary offices used by asylum officials in an hour-long protest yesterday over conditions.
Jose Carreira, executive director of the European Asylum Support Office, said that at least four shipping containers where interviews were conducted were entirely destroyed, and three more were damaged.
“Incidents have occurred in the past but this is the most serious one,” Carreira told AFP.
“We are looking into ways of guaranteeing that this might not happen again,” said Carreira, who is in Athens for meetings with Greece’s immigration ministry.
No-one was hurt in the incident as the blaze was quickly brought under control by firefighters, but Carreira said it could be days before asylum interviews can resume.
Around 70 migrants took part in the protest, most of them from Pakistan and Bangladesh, a local police source said.
Police made a dozen arrests.
The incident took place at the overcrowded Moria camp, one of five centres on Greek Aegean islands, which have borne the brunt of Europe’s migrant crisis.
More than 15,000 migrants are being held on the Aegean islands, pending their return to Turkey under an EU-Turkish agreement reached in March this year.
Processing has been held up because the vast majority have filed for political asylum.
Part of Moria, which has a capacity for 3,500 people but currently houses more than 5,000, was badly damaged in a fire during clashes last month between migrants and police.
Nearly 66,000 refugees and migrants are currently stranded in Greece, according to official figures.
In Bulgaria meanwhile, some 300 Afghan migrants protested yesterday in the country’s largest migrant reception centre, near the Turkish border, according to a human rights group.
“They protested against the fact that they are being kept in Bulgaria against their will and demanded to be able to leave towards Serbia and then (western) Europe,” said Iliana Savova, a spokeswoman for the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, adding that around 300 migrants took part in the demonstration.
Bulgaria’s interior ministry confirmed “tensions” at the site, which is home to around 3,800 migrants – around half of whom are Afghans.
Some 13,000 migrants remain stranded inside Bulgaria, after other transit countries along the western Balkan route shut their borders earlier this year.
And close to 50 migrants ended a brief hunger strike yesterday in an immigration detention centre in Barcelona, police said, just days after a riot took place in a similar facility in Madrid.


Related Story