Giada Zampano
15 September 2023•Update: 15 September 2023
ROME
A bus transferring dozens of migrants from the tiny island of Lampedusa to the northern Piedmont region crashed with a track on Thursday night, killing the two drivers and wounding 25 people.
The accident happened on the highway close to Rome while the migrants, who had arrived in Lampedusa, were transferred to reception centers in the north, authorities said.
Two of the migrants were severely wounded, while the others were only lightly injured.
The crash happened amid an emergency situation in the southern island of Lampedusa, where thousands of migrants disembarked in the past few days after surviving dangerous crossings in an attempt to reach European shores.
The Lampedusa reception center was overwhelmed, as authorities worked to transfer to the mainland thousands of people who arrived on small and fragile boats.
The Red Cross said there were still 4,200 migrants at the center out of the 6,800 who reached the tiny tourist island in a flotilla of some 120 boats that set out from Tunisia.
Italy recently signed a repatriation agreement with Tunisia to send back Tunisians found ineligible for asylum, but not with most of the other countries whose migrants come to Italy.
According to the Interior Ministry, nearly 126,000 migrants reached Italy by sea this year as of Thursday, nearly double the number as by the same time last year.
The record flux of migrants is adding pressure on the right-wing government headed by Premier Giorgia Meloni, who had pledged a crackdown on illegal migration during the electoral campaign that led to her election last September.
On Thursday, Deputy Prime Minister and League’s leader Matteo Salvini called the surge in migrants’ arrivals witnessed in the past few days an “act of war,” adding that the government was ready to go “any possible way” to stop the flow.
“The diplomatic path is essential to follow, but the entire government is working day and night and I do not rule out any kind of intervention,” he said.
