Life Support Disembarks 52 Rescued People in Catania

At 23:15 on Tuesday, 12 March, EMERGENCY’s search and rescue ship Life Support completed the disembarkation of 52 people rescued on 11 March in the international waters of the Libyan SAR region. The distress case had been spotted from the bridge of Life Support after an alert from Alarm Phone.

“The disembarkation operations of the 52 people rescued by Life Support were completed without any problems. The disembarkation was very quick, as was the rescue on 11 March in international waters,” explains Luca Radaelli, a member of the EMERGENCY team on board Life Support. “This was not our only rescue activity in recent days: on 9 March, we attempted to rescue about 40 people who had landed on the Tunisian gas extraction platform MISKAR, in the Maltese SAR region. Although the platform initially gave us permission to carry out the rescue, it later denied us permission to approach and requested that we transfer the 40 people to a Tunisian naval vessel. We refused, because Tunisia cannot be considered a safe place: it is a country where systematic human rights violations, racial discrimination, torture and abuse of migrants have been documented.”

The 52 rescued people, including a woman and an unaccompanied child, had left from Zwara, Libya, in a wooden boat. They come from Bangladesh, Syria, Pakistan, Egypt and Nigeria.

“Their condition is stable and there are no serious medical cases,” reports Sara Chessa, a nurse on board Life Support. “As soon as we welcomed the 52 rescued people on board, our medical staff took care of the cases of dehydration and fatigue. During the journey to Catania, they mainly suffered from seasickness due to the difficult weather conditions we encountered. We hope they will have a better life in the near future.”

“I left my country, Bangladesh, because I could not support my family. I arrived in Libya about six months ago to work. I soon realised that what I had been promised did not correspond to reality,” says a 29-year-old man. “I went to Libya from Bangladesh because an acquaintance had told me that I would easily find a job, that life was cheap and I would get a good salary. I had few other options, so I decided to leave my family and set out. When I arrived in Libya, together with other people from my country, I was taken to a warehouse outside Benghazi; they told us that we would start to work, and we would be paid after three months. At the end of this period, they told me they would not pay me and that I had to leave if I did not want them to hurt me. I realised that those who had persuaded me to leave were being paid by the Libyans to bring people from Bangladesh and exploit them. I could not stay in a country where violence is used instead of the law. It took me three months to get my family to send me the money I needed to pay for the sea voyage. I have managed, and now I am safe.”

EMERGENCY’s search and rescue ship Life Support has been operating in the central Mediterranean, the world’s most dangerous migration route, since December 2022. Across sixteen missions, it has rescued 1,271 people.