Deputy Premier and Infrastructure
Minister Matteo Salvini said Monday that it was time to stop
"organized trips" for migrants across the Mediterranean as a
stand-off continued over people saved at sea by NGO-run
search-and-rescue ships.
At the weekend the Humanity 1 and Geo Barents docked in the port
of Catania but the Italian government only allowed people it
considered fragile to disembark.
As a result 35 asylum seekers are still on the Humanity 1, after
144 people were allowed off, and 215 remain aboard the Geo
Barents after 215 were let off.
The captain of the Humanity 1 has said he will not leave Catania
until everyone is allowed off the ship and Geo Barents is also
still in the Sicilian port.
The NGOs running the ships have said they will mount legal
challenges to the decision to only allow some of the asylum
seekers off.
Two other NGO-run ships are in currently in waters near to
Catania, the Rise Above, which as 90 people on board, and the
Ocean Viking, which has rescued 234.
"These are organized trips," Salvini, who imposed on a
closed-ports policy on NGO-run ships when was interior minister
between 2018 and 2019 in the first government of ex-premier
Giuseppe Conte, told RTL radio.
"The people aboard those ships pay around 3,000 dollars, which
gets turned into weapons and drugs for traffickers.
"They are organized trips that are increasingly dangerous.
"It is necessary to halt the trafficking not just of human
beings, which is huge, but also of the arms and drugs linked to
the trafficking of human beings".
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