Over 1,400 migrants land on Lampedusa in 15 boats as weather improves

Fifteen boats packed with hundreds of migrants landed on the southern Italian island of Lampedusa on Sunday 9 May, with officials expecting numbers to increase as the weather improves.

Over 1,400 people got off the vessels at the Mediterranean island, one of the main landing points for people trying to get into Europe, ANSA news agency said.

“Migrants arrivals are resuming alongside good weather,” Lampedusa mayor Toto Martello told state broadcaster RAI. “We need to restart discussions about immigration.”

Italy has seen 11,000 irregular migrants arriving in the first five months of 2021, up from 4,105 the previous year. Overall numbers are still down from 2015, when hundreds of thousands of migrants made the dangerous sea crossing to Europe, many of them fleeing poverty and conflict across Africa and the Middle East.

The far-right is now on the attack in Italy: the Lega leader Matteo Salvini called on Prime Minister Mario Draghi to tackle the issue. “With millions of Italians facing difficulties, we cannot care for thousands of illegal migrants,” he tweeted.

One of the boats was carrying 400 migrants alone; another boat carrying 325 people was intercepted eight miles off Lampedusa. Other migrants reached Lampedusa coast aboard smaller vessels.

The EU is now mulling the use of a special budget, designed to deliver military aid, to support Libya's coast guard.

The proposal is to use the so-called European Peace Facility as part of a deal to relaunch stalled Libyan coast guard training exercises. The European Peace Facility, brokered by the French, comes with a €5 billion budget to allow the EU to shore up armies in Africa, and elsewhere.

The money is placed in an off-budget because the EU is banned from using EU funds to finance foreign military operations.

The Libyan coast guard is being used by the European Union to prevent migrants and asylum seekers from reaching European soil. But it appears that the EU’s border agency Frontex is collaborating directly with the guard, some of whose members are linked to various Libyan militias, known to torture and extort migrants for ransoms in detention centres.

The EU has already trained the coast guard through operation Sophia Between 2016 and 2020, to get the Libyans to intercept migrants within their search and rescue zone.

Sophia has since been replaced by Irini, which is aimed at stopping weapons being shipped into Libya, and not to rescue migrants at sea.