Intelligence reports indicate nearly 700,000 migrants are in Libya awaiting an opportunity to set out by sea toward Italy, a lawmaker from Premier Giorgia Meloni's far-right party said Sunday, but a UN migration official called the number not credible.
Tommaso Foti, the lower parliamentary house whip for the Brothers of Italy Party, told television channel Tgcom24 the Italian secret services estimated that 685,000 migrants in Libya, many of them in detention camps, were eager to sail across the central Mediterranean Sea in smugglers' boats.
But of that number "only a minimum part want to leave and only a minimum part succeeds in leaving" for Europe, Di Giacomo said. For example, many migrants in Libya come from Niger and Chad, two African nations on Libya's southern border, and eventually return to their homelands, he said. With the island struggling to care for so many people arriving within a short time, authorities aim to transfer hundreds of them by boat and aircraft to other temporary shelters for asylum-seekers.
Meloni's government has rebuffed criticism that the coast guard should have been sent out to rescue the boat's passengers when the vessel first was spotted farther off the coast. The International Organization for Migration and humanitarian groups say passengers whose vessels are turned back by the Libyan coast guard often are returned to detention camps, where they are at risk of abuse, including torture, until their families raise enough money for the migrants to set out again by sea.
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