For three days and three nights, these African migrants clung desperately to life. Their means of survival is a tuna net, being towed across the Mediterranean by a Maltese tug that refused to take them on board after their frail boat sank.

Malta and Libya, where they had embarked on their perilous journey, washed their hands of them. Eventually, they were rescued by the Italian navy.

The astonishing picture shows them hanging on to the buoys that support the narrow runway that runs around the top of the net. They had had practically nothing to eat or drink.

Last night, on the island of Lampedusa, the 27 young men - from Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan and other countries - told of their ordeal. As their flimsy boat from Libya floundered adrift for six days, two fishing boats failed to rescue them. On Wednesday, the Maltese boat, the Budafel allowed them to mount the walkway but refused to have them on board.

This is the latest snapshot from the killing seas of the southern Mediterranean, the stretch of water at the European Union’s southern gate that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees says “has become like the Wild West, where human life has no value any more and people are left to their fate”.

On Friday, The Independent reported how a Maltese plane photographed a crazily overloaded boat in this area carrying 53 Eritreans, several of whom telephoned desperate pleas for help to relatives in London, Italy and Malta. The boat disappeared with all hands before anything was done to save them. They died, not because help was unavailable, but because no-one wanted to do anything. Malta is full up. Libya, where these voyages begin, takes no responsibility. One might think that the EU’s new frontiers agency, Frontex, had a part to play. But its “rapid response team” remains on the drawing board.

[tags]Africa, migrants[/tags]

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007 at 7:47 am and is filed under travel-news. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.