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Migrant crisis: Libyan boat carrying 330 migrants lands in Sicily

They will be the latest of the 25,000 migrants who have arrived in Italy this year

Doug Bolton
Saturday 25 April 2015 16:30 BST
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A boat carrying 330 migrants sailing from Libya is set to land at the port of Augusta, near Catania on the eastern coast of Sicily, later today.

They will be the latest in a string of over 25,000 migrants that have arrived in Italy by sea since the beginning of 2015.

This figure includes 2,298 women and 1,478 unaccompanied children, all who have made the dangerous and expensive crossing of the Mediterranean in an effort to escape strife and poverty in their home countries.

The port is a common destination for migrant boats due to its proximity to the Libyan coast, which is around 350 miles away. A number of migrants arrived at the port on 16 April, followed by another boat of 446 migrants, most of whom were fleeing the conflict in Syria, on Wednesday.

On the long journey through the desert on the way to the north African coast, death and rape are commonplace - two Palestinian boys made the journey packed on to a smuggler's truck, and saw people who fell off being left behind in the desert to die.

Many children opt to walk through the desert to Libya, being unable to afford passage on a vehicle - many die from dehydration during the journey.

Smugglers typically charge migrants around $1,500 for the sea crossing, who face squalid conditions, disease and starvation in the process. Many are held in makeshift prisons in Libya while they wait to make the crossing, and migrants have reported that children in these prisons have resorted to eating their own faeces and drinking their own urine due to a lack of food and water.

A worse fate came for the 700 migrants, including 100 children, who died at sea last week, after their boat capsized around 60 miles from the Libyan coast.

European Union leaders met on Thursday to try and find a solution to the mounting humanitarian crisis occuring in north Africa amongst desperate refugees and migrants.

They committed extra ships and aircraft to the lifesaving effort, and also discussed using military action against the smugglers in an effort to stem the passage of the boats

EU leaders also tripled the funding of Triton, the EU's maritime border patrol, giving it a budget of €120 million for this year.

But children's rights group Save the Children said the EU's measures were not enough.

A spokesman said: "The deal on search and rescue is a case of two steps forward one step back. The commitment to triple Triton’s budget and national offers of significant new search and rescue capacity are critical breakthroughs. But fudging the question of Triton’s mandate isn’t good enough."

“EU leaders need to clear this up within hours and commit to Triton’s expansion of operational area and explicit search and rescue responsibility. Europe took a small step back from the moral abyss today, but it needs to do much more in the coming hours to provide clarity and turn this momentum into lives saved at sea.”

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