Geo Barents rescues more than 260 people in Mediterranean
By|infomigrants
The crew of the Geo Barents carried out four separate rescue operations in the central Mediterranean on Thursday. The NGO ship now has 268 migrants on board.
“A busy day at sea for our team,” tweeted the crew of the Geo Barents, a private rescue ship operated by the charity Doctors without Borders (MSF), on Thursday (October 27). The crew reportedly carried out four rescues in four hours, taking 268 people aboard the ship.
Among those they rescued are three pregnant women and 33 minors — the youngest of whom is “only 11 months old,” said the crew of Geo Barents in another tweet. Some of the survivors, they said, “are exhausted and dehydrated. Some of them spent three days at sea with scared children to look after.”
The organization Alarm Phone had alerted the authorities and private rescue ships to the presence of several migrant boats departing Libya this week. The four rescue operations carried out by MSF were “located in [the] Maltese search and rescue region,” according to MSF.
The Geo Barents had only returned to sea on Wednesday (October 26) after recently disembarking nearly 300 migrants in the Italian port of Taranto.
More than 682 migrants awaiting a safe harbor
Two other private rescue ships operating in the area at the moment, the Ocean Viking and the Humanity 1, also carried out multiple rescues this week. Between them, the two ships have 414 migrants on board.
The crews of both ships have said that they have asked the authorities for a safe harbor in which to disembark the migrants they rescued, but have so far received no response. The new Italian government meanwhile has issued several statements this week indicating that it hopes to ban private rescue ships from entering its territorial waters and disembarking large groups of migrants.
At the same time as the government issued these warnings, the Italian coast guard and border and customs police (Guardia di Finanza) rescued more than 1,150 migrants off the Sicilian island of Lampedusa. These migrants were brought directly on shore in Crotone, Calabria.
