Italy Estimates 680K Migrants Might Cross Sea from Libya

 Intelligence reports indicate nearly 700,000 migrants are in Libya awaiting an opportunity to set out by sea toward Italy, a lawmaker from Premier Giorgia Meloni’s far-right party said Sunday, but a U.N. migration official called the number not credible.

Tommaso Foti, the lower parliamentary house whip for the Brothers of Italy Party, told television channel Tgcom24 the Italian secret services estimated that 685,000 migrants in Libya, many of them in detention camps, were eager to sail across the central Mediterranean Sea in a smuggler’s boat.

Separately, 30 migrants were missing and 17 were rescued some 100 nautical miles (180 kilometers) from Libya’s coast after their boat overturned while a commercial vessel was trying to take them aboard, the Italian coast guard reported Sunday night.

Stressing that the capsizing happened outside Italy’s area of search-and-rescue responsibility, the coast guard said several other merchant vessels were helping to look for the boat’s missing passengers.

The humanitarian group Alarm Phone signalled to Italy’s national coordination centre and to Libyan and Maltese authorities on Saturday that the boat with 47 people on board needed assistance.

Libyan authorities, citing “lack of naval assets availability,” contacted the Rome-based maritime aid coordination centre, which sent a satellite message about an emergency to all ships in the area, according to the Italian coast guard statement.

It said the commercial motorboat that took on the 17 survivors was headed for Italy but would first stop in Malta to disembark two people in urgent need of medical care. A spokesperson for the Libyan coast guard did not respond to a request for comment

Meloni is hoping a European Union meeting later this month yields concrete solidarity from fellow leaders of EU nations in managing the large numbers of migrants and asylum-seekers who come to countries on the Mediterranean’s rim, including Greece, Cyprus, Malta and Spain as well as Italy.

“Europe can’t look the other way,″ Foti said.

While the intelligence services assessment sparked alarming headlines in Italy, a spokesperson for the International Organization for Migration cautioned that the figure appeared to be confusing the high end of the estimated number of migrants in Libya with those who were actually seeking to head from there to Europe.

“This number seems to be an estimate, that we also give, of the total presence in Libya,″ Flavio Di Giacomo told The Associated Press in Rome.

But of that number “only a minimum part want to leave and only a minimum part succeeds in leaving” for Europe, Di Giacomo said. For example, many migrants in Libya come from Niger and Chad, two African nations on Libya’s southern border, and eventually return to their homelands, he said.

The Italian intelligence service’s estimate “is the last of a long series of alarms that we’ve seen in the last 10, 12 years that turned out to be mistaken″ Di Giacomo said. ”That number doesn’t seem to be absolutely credible.”