L’Ocean Viking, ambulance ship chartered by SOS Méditerranée, rescued 68 migrants in distress in international waters off Libya on the morning of Sunday September 10, announced the humanitarian NGO based in France.
These shipwrecked people found themselves on “a double-deck wooden boat which left Zouara in Libya last nightsaid the NGO in a press release. Several of them are suffering from seasickness and are currently being treated by the medical team of SOS Méditerranée and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) on board theocean viking. »
To disembark these 68 survivors, the Italian authorities assigned the boat the port… of Ancona, located in the Adriatic Sea, “1,560 km (four days of navigation” of the operating area, deplored SOS Méditerranée.
In photos published by the NGO on X (formerly Twitter), we see several dozen migrants crammed into a makeshift boat wearing orange life jackets.
The most dangerous migration route in the world
At the end of August, theocean viking had already rescued 438 migrants in distress at sea in international waters off Libya and Tunisia before heading to Genoa (northern Italy), the remote safe port assigned to it by the Italian authorities for disembark the survivors.
The central Mediterranean is the most dangerous migration route in the world, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The UN agency estimates that since the start of 2023, 2,013 migrants have disappeared there compared to 1,417 for the whole of 2022.
In June, a shipwreck presented as one of the most serious involving migrants in the Mediterranean left at least 82 dead, but in the eastern Mediterranean. L’ocean viking was detained for 10 days in July by the Italian authorities who accused him of security failures, but he was authorized to return to sea on July 21.