Karl Stagno-Navarra
The Armed Forces and Frontex air and naval assets were, until late yesterday night, monitoring a dinghy laden with Somali migrants who were insisting to be allowed to travel on towards Italy.
According to senior military sources, the dinghi was constantly monitored as soon as it reached Maltese SAR waters. However a spat with Italy was brewing as two surveillance aircraft scrambled from Lampedusa were hovering above the Maltese patrol boat documenting the procedures.
Late in the evening the operations were taken over by the AFM Commander and the migrant boat was left to proceed unaided towards Italy.
Meanwhile, the AFM were on the lookout for another boat with a reported 150 Somali migrants on board and who supposedly left a Libyan port on Thursday night, heading North towards either Malta or Lampedusa.
The alert was raised by a Somali migrant currently held in detention in Safi, who reportedly received a phone call from a relative who is allegedly aboard the boat.
The report was received by the AFM Operations centre in Luqa, which was until yesterday investigating its veracity.
So far no direct contact has been made by the migrants, who are supposedly at sea, with any rescue centre either in Malta or in Italy. But humanitarian organisations are starting to express preoccupation given the bad weather conditions prevailing on the high seas.
Meanwhile, the AFM yesterday recovered another body off Birzebbugia, which is thought to be the second victim from the two boatloads of migrants that landed in the area on Thursday night.
At first it was thought that one migrant had died while trying to swim ashore, but as doctors from Médècins Sans Frontièrs (Msf) visited the migrants yesterday, it transpired that not one, but two migrants had lost their lives while attempting to swim to shore.
But as Malta faced more migrant arrivals this week, an attempt by the AFM to counter the wave of criticism it was subject to by the Italian media over the controversial rescue of five Eritrean migrants backfired.
An aerial photograph of AFM personnel intercepting the Eritrean migrant’s dinghy in Libyan SAR waters was published on Wednesday (five days later) and led the Italian media to take the AFM to task on important details that failed to determine the alleged “good conditions” the Eritreans were in when they intercepted them.
Some media criticised the fact that the AFM made “mistakes” in the time they claim to have intercepted the migrants, and the discrepancy in time shown on the photograph.
But the worst was yet to come, when Sicilian magistrates sequestered the photograph and inserted it as evidence in the inquiry that is currently being conducted.
The magistrates have threatened Malta and the AFM with indictments on omission of rescue and multiple homicide, given that the Eritreans who were taken to Lampedusa claimed to have lost 75 of their friends on the same trip, and that they were not rescued by the AFM when intercepted.
The Maltese government has expressed its willingness to cooperate with the Italian authorities in any investigation, but strongly denies having refused the Eritrean migrants with rescue.
Ministers Tonio Borg and Carm Mifsud Bonnici, together with AFM Commander Carmel Vassallo, claimed that the Eritreans themselves refused to be taken aboard an AFM patrol boat and insisted to be left to continue their voyage to Italy.
In another development, Home Affairs minister Carm Mifsud Bonnici took the Italian authorities to task this week by revealing that the Guardia di Finanza had “destroyed” the evidence which clearly showed that the dinghy could not have carried 80 people.
“They (GdF) destroyed the dinghy and with it all the evidence that shows that the Eritrean migrant’s story doesn’t make sense,” Minister Mifsud Bonnici told the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto.
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