Boats bring a thousand immigrants to Italy in one weekend

About 1,000 immigrants have been pouring into Italy since the weekend, taking advantage of the calm seas and clear skies to make landfall.

About 1,000 immigrants have been pouring into Italy since the weekend, taking advantage of the calm seas and clear skies to make landfall.

Two Liberian sailors on one of the boats that docked in Sicily were arrested and charged with aiding and abetting illegal immigration. Yesterday, four more seamen, all Turkish, were arrested in Calabria.

More than 23,000 clandestini washed up on Italy's shores last year and hundreds more died in the attempt. The traffic is believed to be managed by mafia gangs, Italian or Albanian or a combination of the two. So common are the landfalls that they hardly get any attention in the press but the mass arrivals at the weekend inundated reception centres, throwing them into chaos.

Two hundred people, Palestinians, Iraqis and Somalis, turned up on Saturday in Lampedusa, an arid lump of rock halfway between Sicily and North Africa. Shortly afterwards a boat with 118 "Africans and Asians" docked at an island near by.

Fifty-nine Iraqi Kurds arrived at the volcanic island of Pantelleria, also off Sicily, with no trace of the boat that brought them, and 68 at another Sicilian offshore island. Among other boatloads were 200 Kurds, who docked in Calabria. Hungry and thirsty, they saidthey had been at sea since leaving Turkey on 24 May.