2,700 migrants rescued off Libya, 15 dead

Fifteen bodies were recovered and more than 2,700 boat migrants rescued off the coast of Libya on Monday, the Italian coast guard said, in another day of mass departures from North Africa.

Italy’s navy and coast guard, ships patrolling on a European Union anti-smuggling mission, vessels run by humanitarian groups, and a commercial tug boat aided in the rescues.

Earlier in the day, the Italian navy said six bodies had been found after migrants fell out of a leaking rubber boat. The coast guard gave no further details.

The migrants were saved from 19 dangerously overcrowded rubber boats and four small boats, the coast guard said. People smugglers operate freely in Libya, cashing in on migrants desperate to reach Europe.

Last week calmer seas and Libya’s lawlessness opened the way for smugglers to ship 13,000 migrants across the Mediterranean Sea in just four days.

Europe’s worst migrant crisis since World War II is now focused on Italy, at Europe’s southern frontier, where some 93,000 people had arrived by the end of August, according to Italy’s Interior Ministry.

The death toll on the route from North Africa to Italy has jumped to 1 migrant for every 42 making the crossing, compared to 1 in every 52 last year, a U.N. refugee agency spokesman said last week.

Spanish police meanwhile freed four young African migrants found squeezed into a hidden compartment of a minivan with no ventilation at a border crossing from Morocco into Spain and arrested the driver, they said Monday.

The migrants — a woman from Congo and three men from Guinea — were found on Sunday when police at the crossing between Morocco and the Spanish territory of Melilla grew suspicious and searched the vehicle.

They were crammed inside a “hermetic false bottom with no ventilation” located below the front seats of the minivan, police said in a statement.

The woman began yelling in French: “Please, please, get me out of here. I’m scared. I don’t feel my legs and my feet are really swollen!”

Firefighters had to use an electric saw and other tools to free the migrants who were all in “very poor physical shape” and in need of medical care.

Police said all four migrants, aged between 21 and 27, are now in good health.

Officers arrested the driver and only other occupant of the vehicle, a Moroccan man.

Temperatures on Sunday neared 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit) in Melilla, which has one of only two land borders between Africa and the European Union.

The other is at Ceuta, another Spanish territory nearly 400 km (250 miles) away on the north coast of Africa.

The two territories have for some years been a flashpoint for African migrants trying to enter Spain and seek a better life in Europe, with authorities stepping up security by strengthening border barriers.

japantimes