AA/Nice/Feiza Ben Mohamed
The NGO SOS Méditerranée calls for help and asks to be able to disembark the 296 migrants who were rescued and installed on board the ship Ocean Viking.
“Some of the 296 survivors rescued by the Ocean Viking have spent their tenth night on deck and (…) still do not have the opportunity to disembark”, assures this Sunday the humanitarian organization in a publication on its social networks.
An eight-month-pregnant woman was evacuated, with her husband in a condition deemed “critical”, and a man “jumped from the ship out of exhaustion and despair” before being picked up by SOS Méditerranée teams who also believe that “unjustified delay in allocating a place of safety to people rescued from imminent danger at sea is wreaking dangerous havoc”.
“We are asking today for the application of international maritime law, a rescue is only finished when these people are on land, in a safe port”, explained Friday to the antenna of France Info, Sophie Beau, director of the NGO, urging the nearest countries including Italy and Malta, to allow the ship to disembark its passengers.
She assures us that the migrants who have been taken on board “are people fleeing Libyan hell, a country where they risk death” and that they are now “dehydrated but also in a state of physical fatigue and psychic”.
Of the 296 people, there would be 43 women including 6 pregnant and many children, the youngest of whom is only 3 months old.
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