“Alarm”, reads a tweet posted by the commander. “We have given assistance to another 130 people including many women and children, and no one is helping us! We are reaching a state of emergency. We need immediate assistance from the Italian Coast Guard and the Armed Forces of Malta. We are rescuing 219 people with a crew of 10. Act now, European Union! “
??Alert! #LouiseMichel assisted another 130 people – among them many women & children – and nobody is helping! We are reaching a State of Emergency. We need immediate assistance, @guardiacostiera & @Armed_Forces_MT. We are safeguarding 219 people with a crew of 10. Act #ME, now!
— LouiseMichel (@MVLouiseMichel) August 28, 2020
The Sea Watch response in the morning: “Because the Louise Michel is unable to maneuver while grappling with another desperate rescue, the Sea Watch 4 – (found) still over 4 hours away – has changed course. to assist you. The reason? Because the European authorities deny assistance once again. The EU should be ashamed! “. While the Ionian Sea, of Mediterranea,
she said she was ready to sail from the port of Augusta (Syracuse) “We decided to intervene, anticipating the scheduled start of our Mission 09 by 48 hours, because so far neither the Maltese nor the Italian authorities are providing the necessary assistance to over 150 people in imminent danger of their lives “, reads the note from the NGO.
“It will be a journey of many hours – continues the note – and we hope that the military units of the Italian Coast Guard or the Maltese ones decide to intervene sooner. The Louise Michel, with 165 shipwrecked on board, and the dozens people still at sea would in fact be easily reachable in less than two hours from Lampedusa and in less than three from Valletta with fast set-ups. The Louise Michel has been assisting a rubber dinghy on which there were 130 people since last night. The situation is dramatic, one person on board died and the crew cannot guarantee assistance to everyone. There are many women and children, many people have serious medical problems due to burns from gasoline and from the many hours at sea “. “Helping these people – concludes Mediterranea – is a matter of life or death. And once again European civil society, starting with Mediterranea and the Ionian Sea, will do its part”.
The boat purchased by Banksy for humanitarian purposes is a former unit of the French Customs Navy flying the German flag and is 31 meters long. Set sail in recent days from Spain, on Thursday she rescued a boat with 89 migrants off the coast of Libya. But now he has encountered another boat with 130 people and has taken these too, creating a dangerous overcrowding on board, having almost double the 130 people he can carry. One of the migrants is alleged to have already died, others have suffered burns caused by fuel, about thirty would find themselves on a life raft. Life jackets were distributed to all, but the situation is described by Commander Pia Klemp as serious and increasingly worrying. For this reason, in the night between Friday and Saturday, he launched an SOS through social media. “We repeat”, we read in a subsequent post, “the #LouiseMichel is unable to maneuver safely and no one comes to our aid. The rescued people have suffered extreme trauma, it is time for them to be taken to a safe place ”.
Migrants, Banksy’s ship in action: 89 people have already been saved in the Mediterranean
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According to Marine Traffic, a ship monitoring site in the Mediterranean, the ship was about 90 kilometers southeast of the island of Lampedusa at dawn this morning. On Friday he responded to an SOS from Moonbird, a plane that monitors boats of migrants in distress in the area, that he had spotted a rubber boat that was no longer moving and was filling up with water due to a leak. Passengers had previously managed to contact Alarm Phone, a telephone hotline that assists refugees at sea, requesting immediate help. Alarm Phone and Moonbird activists claim to have passed the request to the European authorities, but – writes the Guardian – “neither Malta nor Italy have reacted adequately”.
La Louise Michel is named after a 19th century French anarchist. Also known for his vehement criticism of European migration policy, Banksy decorated it with the image of a little girl wearing a life jacket and holding a heart-shaped life buoy. The identity of the English artist, famous for his murals and graffiti, has never been revealed, but it is assumed that he was born and raised in Bristol. The purchase of the ship is his latest humanitarian initiative: “I have done works on migrants, but obviously I don’t want to keep the money”, he wrote to Pia Klemp in recent days, offering to buy and make a yacht available to him to help migrants in the Mediterranean.
In the meantime, the landings in Lampedusa do not stop, where, during the night, four small boats with a total of 74 Tunisian migrants on board. In the late evening, however, the carabinieri blocked two groups of 37 and 13 Tunisians on the island, between Cala Creta and the Madonnina pier. All were taken to the collapsing hotspot of the island where, at the moment, there are 1,050 people with a maximum capacity of 192. A small boat of about ten meters, however, was found on the beach of San Leone, in Agrigento, at the Viale delle Dune. No trace of the migrants, the police are continuing their searches. 49 migrants landed in Marzamemi and transferred to a reception facility in the Pantanelli district in Syracuse. The sailing boat with also 8 women and 4 minors on board, was identified about 2 miles off the coast of the seaside village in Syracuse and was then authorized to dock at Porto Fossa in Marzamemi. The migrants are in good health. Coronavirus swabs were carried out on board the boat. In Locride about 60 migrants, including several minors, of Iranian and Syrian nationality, were intercepted in the night off Roccella Jonica aboard a sailing ship and escorted by a Coast Guard patrol boat to the tourist port.
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