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Picture
belonging to the article - © Agence France-Presse — Getty Images - A handout
photo by the Italian Navy on Friday showed migrants being rescued by the navy
off the coast of Sicily.
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ROME — Italy has rescued about 5,200 people and
recovered three bodies from overcrowded boats in the Mediterranean Sea since
early Thursday, officials said Sunday.
Calm seas have created an opportunity for this latest
wave of migrants who have left North African shores for Italy over the past
three days, an Italian Navy spokesman said. Merchant ships and a Maltese vessel
aided the navy in the rescue efforts.
A merchant tanker recovered three bodies from one of
the migrants’ boats, the spokesman said, adding that he had no details about
the dead.
Three merchant ships took aboard a total of 700
migrants, a navy statement said, and it was taking them to ports in Sicily.
The surge in the arrival of migrants is straining the
ability of the Italian Navy to patrol the waters between Africa and Italy on
its own. It has prompted officials in Sicily, where most of the migrants are
taken, to call for more European support. “Europe can’t just turn its back on
us,” Lillo Firetto, mayor of the Sicilian port city of Porto Empedocle, said in
a television interview on Sunday. “This isn’t just Sicily’s border, but it’s
Europe’s border, too.”
