Five suspects were arrested today by order of the State Ministry in Messina, Sicily, in southern Italy.
“During the transition, water and food resources were inhumanly rationed, to the extent that migrants were forced to share a cup of coffee full of water among ten people,” the public ministry said in a statement, which details the conditions under which the 674 people rescued traveled from a fishing boat.
Migrants were also beaten with “sticks and belts”.
Due to the intense heat and the lack of drinking water, “many of the migrants fell ill and said they saw their fellow travelers die from heat and dehydration, as they even had to drink sea and machine water.”
According to the same memo, crew members appointed a migrant to manage and ration the drinking water supply, who was beaten if he refused, “with the added effect of further progressive drinking water rationing for the migrants.”
The migrants also reported that they left Libya a month later at the “halfway house”, a staging post where migrants are detained, and that during the crossing, the crew suddenly turned off their engines and asked for help with a satellite communications device. and then thrown overboard.
A ship carrying 674 migrants was rescued on Saturday 124 miles off Calabria by a merchant ship, three Coast Guard patrol boats and a Guardia di Finanza unit, which also found five lifeless bodies on board.
The rescued, many of whom were on the water, were taken by a Coast Guard vessel to Messina, Syracuse, Catania and Crotone after a rescue operation that also involved a Navy patrol aircraft and a Frontex aircraft.
Thousands of migrants have arrived in small boats off the Italian coast in recent days, and about a thousand are waiting to disembark after being rescued by humanitarian ships Ocean Viking and Sea Watch3.
The reception center on the island of Lampedusa is overcrowded again, over 1,600 when its capacity is about 350, and the Ministry of the Interior announced the dispatch of a ship to unload the center just a week after an operation similar to solve the surplus of migrants and the state of abandonment of a place where about 2,000 people live and lots of rubbish.
According to the Italian Interior Ministry, since the beginning of the year, more than 34,000 people have arrived on the coast of the country, while last year 25,000 people arrived in Italy during the same period.
