Malta casts doubts on surviving Eritreans' claims :
Valletta, Malta - Malta's army chief admitted Saturday his soldiers provided fuel to five Eritrean migrants who were stranded at sea but cast doubts on their claims that 73 people died on board the same dinghy. The army sent a patrol boat to the area to offer assistance but according to army chief Carmel Vassallo the immigrants adamantly refused to be taken to Malta.
He told a news conference that the four men and one woman were looking "relatively fresh" and the dinghy appeared to be "good as new."
An Italian coast guard patrol on Thursday rescued five Eritreans, found suffering from dehydration and heat exhaustion, and floating in a rubber dinghy south of the Italy's Mediterranean islet of Lampedusa.
The five said that 73 of their fellow would-be immigrants died at sea after they sailed from Libya 20 days ago. But the story has been mired in conflicting versions, amid a potential diplomatic row between Italy and Malta.
When the dinghy was spotted for the first time by an airplane that forms part of the EU's Frontex mission it was in the Libyan search- and-rescue area and had only five people on board, Malta's Foreign Minister Tonio Borg said.
Despite the incident, Borg said Malta has no intention of reducing its search-and-rescue zone.
He told the news conference: "Our search-and-rescue zone is not for sale," though he did not rule out dialogue with Italy about the management of this zone.
His Italian counterpart Franco Frattini told the newspaper Corriere della Sera that it is clear Malta lacks the instruments, such as number of boats and crews, to control such a wide area.
Italy: Illegal immigrants top one million, says charity
Despite a tougher stance on immigration in Italy, immigrants have not been deterred from entering the country illegally. The Catholic relief organisation Caritas says the number of illegal immigrants now living in Italy has topped one million....
Opposition outcry as Italy legalises vigilante patrols
Silvio Berlusconi's government, which has already put several thousand soldiers on the streets of Italy, will tomorrow legalise vigilante patrols and set out the guidelines under which they will operate.
The plans prompted an outcry from opposition politicians and police unions, but got a mixed reception from Italy's mayors, who must decide whether they want law enforcement volunteers in their towns. An overwhelming majority of those in favour run cities in the north, where the anti-immigrant Northern League has long argued for wider use of vigilantes.
The interior minister, Roberto Maroni, a member of the Northern League, denied that the plan was to introduce vigilantism to Italy: "The decree does not create [vigilante] patrols; it regulates them."
After rejecting the scheme, Rome's mayor, Gianni Alemanno, a former neo-fascist, appears to have embraced it. The head of his council's security committee, Fabrizio Santori, said vigilantes in flurorescent jackets would be deployed in parks, outside schools and at tourist sites.
Read the full article by clicking the link above.
AGI News On - MARONI: PATROLS TO START ON AUG. 8.
Rome, 4 Aug. - "We are ready. In a week I will sign the decree that establishes the regulations for the so-called civilian patrols and on August 8 they will begin," announced Interior Minister Roberto Maroni in an interview with 'Padania', in newsstands today. The Northern League representative also rejected the request for an extension of an amnesty to other sectors including domestic help and caretakers by PdL Minister Claudio Scajola. "If this request by Scajola is the same as the one made by Epifani, the request is denied because there was a different agreement within the government".
Lampedusa, another dramatic case of immigrants being driven back to where they came from
Lampedusa, July 29th, 2009.
After the 89 refugees sent back to Libya on Wednesday July 1st, 2009 and the 47 people sent back to Ghaddafi’s “concentration camps” on July 5th; yesterday, July 29th, 14 more immigrants - including two women and a child - were picked out of the sea in the Strait of Sicily and deported back to the port they had set out from.
