It is a massacre of migrants off the coast of Libya: in various shipwrecks so far over 170 have died in the last three days, and there are still hundreds of people missing without help at sea. The humanitarian ships, which unlike what Interior Minister Salvini claims were not in the areas where the smugglers abandoned the migrants, are trying to intervene but the situation is tragic. In the last shipwreck, in a boat with 120 migrants on board there were only three survivors, brought back to Tripoli by the Libyan Coast Guard: “We left the night before, there were 120 of us on the dinghy, all without life jackets. After ten hours she began to take on water. Then people began to fall into the sea. The women were holding up those two little children, but then they too fell. And no one came. We grabbed onto something that was floating, we stayed in the water for at least three hours", they said, adding: "Better to die than to return to Libya".
Only in this shipwreck were there therefore 117 victims, including 10 women (one of them pregnant) and two children, the youngest was only two months old. "The NGOs are back, the smugglers are back to doing business and killing and I'm the bad guy?", Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini accused in a live Facebook broadcast, while the President of the Republic Mattarella expresses "deep pain" and Prime Minister Conte says under shock in the face of the first massacre of 2019 in a Mediterranean now devoid of any rescue device. In the same hours five other boats departed from Libya: two (with 68 and 13 people) landed in Lampedusa, two other dinghies brought back by the Libyan Coast Guard, one rescued by Sea Watch which took 47 migrants on board. Salvini has already warned them: "They forget to start over the usual manfrine of the port in Italy or of the" bad Salvini ". In Italian".
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi appeals to Europe: “We cannot close our eyes to the large number of people who are losing their lives at Europe's gates. UNHCR is concerned that the actions of states are increasingly dissuading NGOs from delivering relief. At the same time, more safe and legal ways of accessing asylum procedures are needed in Europe”.
