The Italian coast guard rescued 1,400 illegal immigrants off the east coast of Calabria, southern Italy, in an operation lasting more than 24 hours, according to a coast guard press release on Wednesday.
The statement said that rescue operations started late Monday and ended in the early hours of Wednesday.
Illegal immigrants were on overcrowded vessels, including 47 people on a sailboat.
The rescue operation took place off the region of Calabria’s coast, in the Ionian Sea, at the “toe” of the Italian peninsula.
One coast guard vessel took on around 590 migrants from aboard a fishing boat and later brought around 650 to the shore from another fishing boat.
A coast guard motor boat and an Italian border patrol ship assisted a fourth vessel with 130 migrants aboard.
Authorities did not give details on the type of danger, the route of the migrant vessels, or the nationalities of the illegal immigrants. But many boats with illegal immigrants in the Ionian Sea set off from Turkey, where smugglers launch crowded and unsafe boats.
Wednesday’s statement by the coast guard said that crew on a Frontex surveillance plane had spotted a fishing boat with the 590 migrants aboard. Frontex is the European Union’s border monitoring force. A Frontex patrol boat and a Frontex support vessel were among the assets involved in the rescue operations for the two fishing boats, according to the coast guard.
Alarm Phone, a nongovernmental organization that frequently receives satellite calls from migrant vessels in distress and relays the information to maritime authorities in Italy and Malta, was among the organizations signaling the need for rescue for the 130 people aboard the fourth boat.
Earlier this year, a migrant boat navigating on that route slammed into a sandbank just off a Calabrian beach town and broke apart. At least 94 migrants perished and 80 others survived.
That shipwreck is under criminal investigation, including the role of several members of Italy’s border police corps, which operates vessels off the country’s long coastline. Four suspected smugglers have been arrested.
Transnational Operations
Italian police in May arrested 29 suspected smugglers as they targeted a transnational operation that for years brought migrants illegally into Italy by sea and then moved them overland into northern Europe.The nearly four-year-long investigation was spearheaded by prosecutors in Calabria. Catanzaro Chief Prosecutor Nicola Gratteri described the investigation as groundbreaking in terms of understanding how a series of smuggling gangs work together, from point of origin to point of destination for the migrants, as well as in following the trail of the laundered profits made from the illegal immigrants.
Depending on how much the illegal migrants could pay—investigators said some paid as much as 15,000 euros ($16,500) each just for the sea leg of the voyage, although the going rate appeared to be 10,000 euros—the passengers on the land routes to northern Europe either took trucks, trains, or taxis across Italy’s northern land borders. Transit points included Ventimiglia, an Italian city near its border with France, and Trieste, in eastern Italy near Slovenia.
Police said colleagues in Turkey, Greece, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Britain, and Morocco collaborated in the investigation that led to the arrests. The operation began in Italy with some 200 officers in various cities, including other major points on the smugglers’ land routes, the cities of Milan and Turin.
