The Italian maritime authorities on Tuesday imposed a quarantine on the Ocean Viking off the Sicilian port of Porto Empedocle, where the humanitarian ship landed overnight 180 migrants gathered at sea, announced its charterer SOS Mediterranean.
Read also: The 180 migrants from the Ocean Viking have landed in Sicily
" As indicated by the maritime authorities, the ship is now at anchor, outside the port of Porto Empedocle, where the crew has been asked " about forty two weeks, said the NGO which charters the ambulance boat, on which is an AFP journalist.
After 10 days of blockage at sea, the 180 migrants brought back on board during four operations on June 25 and 30 were finally able to disembark at this port, after the tests carried out on Sunday on the Ocean Viking by the Italian authorities turned out to be negative. These people, mainly Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, North Africans and Eritreans, including a pregnant woman and 25 minors, were immediately transferred to a ferry to be quarantined there too.
The army sent?
The Ocean Viking, departing from its home port of Marseille, in the south of France, had resumed on Monday June 22nd its rescue operations after three months of stoppage linked to the pandemic of the new coronavirus. This recovery was articulated with an explosion of attempts to cross the Mediterranean from the Libyan and Tunisian coasts since the beginning of the year. In the first six months of 2020, attempts to cross this maritime migratory route, the deadliest in the world according to the UN, have increased by 150% compared to the same period last year.
And Italy fears that the bulk of the contingent of humanitarian ships, which have gradually resumed operations in recent weeks, will arrive after a period of about a month during which no more NGOs were on the ground. The mayor of Porto Empedocle thus demanded Monday the dispatch of the army to " protect the citizens ", deploring the arrival of migrants while Sicily, a poor province in the extreme south of Italy, suffered greatly from the confinement.
