More boats full of migrants reach Italy

ROME (AP) — Italian border police on Saturday escorted a boat with 218 Tunisians aboard to tiny Lampedusa island, where tens of thousands of illegal migrants have arrived since January to escape turmoil in North Africa. Meanwhile, Africans fleeing Libya by sea reached Sicily.

Migrants receives assistance as they arrive on the tiny island of Lampedusa, Italy, on May 8.

Maj. Piergiuseppe Cananzi said the Tunisians will be soon deported. Italy and Tunisia struck a deal in early April to give temporary residency permits to Tunisians who had already arrived but to send back future arrivals.

Lampedusa, a fishing and vacation island closer to north African shores than to the Italian mainland, has seen hundreds of migrants arrive in the past few days, including some 1,300, traveling in eight boats, on Friday.

"Our patrols haven't spotted any more boats" on the horizon, Cananzi told the Associated Press by phone.

No rescues were needed Saturday, but some migrants have perished when their rickety fishing boats or dinghies foundered or overturned in rough seas, and the Italian coast guard and private fishing boats have plucked hundreds of people to safety in the past months.

For years, smugglers have sent boats filled with illegal migrants from Libyan shores to Italy, but the pace quickened dramatically when unrest and fighting erupted in northern Africa.

Italy has been bracing for months for a flood of migrants. Premier Silvio Berlusconi's government says some are being used as tools of retaliation by Libyan leader Moammar Gadhaf. Rome is lending its air bases for NATO operations against the Libya regime that were sanctioned by the U.N. Security Council for humanitarian aims. Italy recently stepped up its participation by authorizing its fighter jets to participate in bombing missions.

More than 33,000 of the 37,000 migrants who have landed on Italian shores since January came to Lampedusa, although others have made landfall on the coasts of Sicily, Sardinia and the southern Italian mainland. More than half of the arrivals have been Tunisians, who largely hope to reach France or other European countries to find relatives or work.

LaPresse news agency reported from Sicily that a boat with 213 migrants from sub-Saharan African was escorted by the Italian coast guard into the harbor of Licata. The boat had set sail from Libya.

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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