Unlucky numbers as migrants flood into Italy

If the casualty figures of the latest migrant ship to sink in the waters of the Mediterranean 70 miles southeast of Malta are not as devastating as the ones last week then it has more to do with luck than design.

A Maltese vessel happened to spot the sinking ship with 2oo people on board. Dozens are feared dead. But that number would have surely been much higher if the authorities had not been alerted by a satellite phone call from the stricken vessel. In fact we may never have heard about this tragedy at all.

The Italian coastguard, which is on the front line of this perilous migration to its shores fears that hundreds if not thousands of people drown every year and we never get to hear about it.

These tragedies remind of a time in the mid 1990s when I was based in Rome and we spent the night with the Financial Police that patrols the coast off the heel of Italy. We were on the look-out for migrant boats heading to Italy from Albania.

The captain of the vessel welcomed our crew on board with a sumptuous meal of lobster tagliatelle, copious amounts of cheap white wine and passionate speeches about European solidarity. But after a night in which we heard plenty of migrant speed boats whizzing past us in the distant dark but never caught a single one on camera he finally had to admit that the coastguard’s boats are much slower than the ones belonging to the people traffickers.

“We never get to catch them on the open water”, he admitted. “We have to apprehend them once they land on shore… and that’s tricky.”

The boats weighed down with migrants from north Africa are not speedy. They chug along, listing and barely sea-worthy. But spotting them in the southern Med brings to mind words like needle and haystack.

The European Union currently deploys four vessels dedicated to looking for migrants. Last year more than 13,000 are thought to have crossed the seas. You do the math.

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