The Ocean Viking, an ambulance ship chartered by SOS Méditerranée, has saved 623 people in distress in 15 rescues in the last 36 hours south-west of the Italian island of Lampedusa, the Marseille-based humanitarian NGO announced on Friday.
Among these migrants, the NGO identified 146 unaccompanied minors and 15 accompanied minors as well as two pregnant women, it told French news agency AFP.
Lacking the capacity to transport all the survivors over a long distance, it was scheduled to disembark some of them on Friday evening towards Lampedusa and the rest at Civitavecchia, a port northwest of Rome, which the ship should reach by 14 or 15 August, said the NGO's deputy director of operations, Carla Melki.
Many of the people rescued are from Sudan, a country that has been at war for nearly four months, but some are also from Bangladesh, Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire and Guinea.
On Thursday, the Ocean Viking received “instructions from the Italian rescue coordination centre to assist cases of distress to the southwest of Lampedusa,” SOS Méditerranée had explained in a statement later that day.
The central Mediterranean is the most dangerous migratory route in the world, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM). The UN agency estimates that since the beginning of 2023, 1,848 migrants have disappeared there compared with 1,417 for the whole of 2022.
The Ocean Viking had been detained for 10 days in July by the Italian authorities, who blamed it for safety failings, but it was allowed to set sail again on 21 July.
