Intelligence reports indicate nearly 700,000 migrants are in Libya awaiting an opportunity to set out by sea toward Italy, a lawmaker from Premier Giorgia Meloni's far-right party said Sunday, but a U.N. migration official called the number not credible.
Tommaso Foti, the lower parliamentary house whip for the Brothers of Italy Party, told television channel Tgcom24 the Italian secret services estimated that 685,000 migrants in Libya, many of them in detention camps, were eager to sail across the central Mediterranean Sea in smugglers’ boats.
The Italian intelligence service’s estimate “is the last of a long series of alarms that we’ve seen in the last 10, 12 years, that turned out to be mistaken” Di Giacomo said. ”That number doesn’t seem to be absolutely credible.”From the start of this year through March 10, some 17,600 arrived, including a few thousand who disembarked at Italian ports in the last several days.
On Sunday, three more bodies were found from a Feb. 26 shipwreck just offshore the Italian peninsula, raising the known death toll in that disaster to 79 migrants, Italian state TV said. A wooden boat that had sailed from Turkey ran into sandbank in rough seas off a beach in Calabria, the toe of the Italian peninsula.
For years, Italy has tried with limited success to induce Libya to stop launches of people smugglers’ unseaworthy fishing boats and rubber dinghies toward Italian shores. Italian governments have trained and equipped the Libyan coast guard.
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