ROME: Italy’s coast guard said Sunday it had rescued 91 people from a migrant boat adrift off the Mediterranean island of Lampedusa, but two males were found dead.
The boat was drifting some 16 nautical miles from the Italian island when it was located by an EU border agency plane, the coast guard said in a statement, adding it had dispatched two patrol boats.
“During the inspection of the below-deck areas, additional migrants in serious health conditions and two bodies, both male, were discovered,” it said.
The survivors — 85 men, one woman and five presumed minors — were disembarked and some taken to hospital by helicopter.
Italian news agency Ansa said that 14 of the migrants were in serious condition, with three requiring intubation.
Ansa said the two migrants died after inhaling petrol while below deck, with 14 others ill for the same reason.
The migrants came from Pakistan, Eritrea and Somalia, it said.
The waters off Lampedusa were the site of another migrant disaster on Friday, when about 20 people went missing after a shipwreck.
The coast guard said Friday that 11 people had been rescued, and one body was recovered, but the rest of the approximately 30 people from that boat were unaccounted for.
Italian coast guard says rescues dozens of migrants, two dead
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Italian coast guard says rescues dozens of migrants, two dead
- Boat was drifting some 16 nautical miles from Lampedusa island
- 85 men, one woman and five presumed minors have survived
German authorities arrest five men suspected of planning Christmas market attack
BERLIN: German authorities have arrested five men suspected of being terrorist militants planning an attack on a Christmas market in southern Bavaria, police and prosecutors said in a joint statement. There has been a series of vehicle ramming attacks in Germany since a militant rammed a hijacked truck into a Christmas market in central Berlin in 2016. Last December several people were killed by an attack in Magdeburg.
Three Moroccan nationals aged 22, 28 and 30, an Egyptian national aged 56 and a 37-year-old Syrian were detained on Friday at the Suben border crossing between Germany and Austria, according to the joint statement late on Saturday.
Investigators believed that the men intended to drive a vehicle into a crowded market in the Dingolfing-Landau area with the aim of killing or injuring as many people as possible, the statement said, adding that authorities suspected a militant motive.
