Rescue ship with 629 migrants left in limbo

Migrants line-up after disembarking at the Reggio Calabria harbour, Southern Italy. An aid ship carrying 629 migrants rescued in the Mediterranean was waiting to learn where it can dock. Photo / AP

A private rescue ship carrying 629 migrants remained at sea after more than a day of not receiving permission to dock in either Italy or the small Mediterranean island nation of Malta.

Aid group SOS Mediterraneee said the passengers on its ship, the Aquarius, included 400 people who were picked up by the Italian Navy, that country's coast guard and private cargo ships and transferred.

The rescue ship's crew itself pulled 229 migrants from the water or from traffickers' unseaworthy boats on Sunday, including 123 unaccompanied minors and seven pregnant women.

The Aquarius and its passengers were caught up in a crackdown promoted by the right-wing partner in Italy's new populist Government, which has vowed to stop the country from becoming the "refugee camp of Europe."

Italian Premier Giuseppe Conte said he personally contacted Malta's Prime Minister, Joseph Muscat, to "explicitly at least take on the human assistance of persons in difficulty aboard the Aquarius."

But Muscat, "while comprehending the situation," rebuffed him, Conte said in a Facebook post. That stance "confirms the latest unwillingness of Malta and, thus, of Europe, to intervene and take care of the emergency."

Like Malta, Italy didn't appear to be budging.

Italy's Interior Minister, Matteo Salvini, who leads the anti-immigrant League Party in the governing coalition, has long railed against what he depicts as Europe's failure to show solidarity with Italy during the migrant crisis in recent years.

"Starting today, Italy, too, begins to say NO to the trafficking of human beings, NO to the business of clandestine immigration," Salvini tweeted today.

After leading an hours-long meeting with his coalition leaders at the Premier's office, Conte said Italy was sending two motorboats with medical staff aboard in case the migrants needed help but he made no mention of how the Aquarius might ever get into port.

Salvini and Italian Transportation Minister Danilo Toninelli, who is part of the 5-Star Movement faction in the new Government, said that it was Malta's responsibility to "open its ports for the hundreds of the rescued on the NGO ship Aquarius."

"The island can't continue to turn the other way," the ministers said. "The Mediterranean is the sea of all the countries that face it, and it (Malta) can't imagine that Italy will continue to face this giant phenomenon in solitude."

Earlier, Malta said in a statement that the Aquarius took on the passengers in waters controlled by Libya and where Italian authorities in Rome coordinate search-and-rescue operations.

The Maltese Rescue Coordination Centre "is neither the competent nor the coordinating authority," the statement said.

- AP