This is a tiny taste of what climate change is going to look like in the future – mass migrations, which by definition overwhelm the countries or regions people migrate to, because it’s not possible to prepare for them in advance. There will be horrors. There already are horrors, and they’ll get worse.
Italian police say they have arrested 15 Muslim migrants after they allegedly threw 12 Christians overboard following a row on a boat headed to Italy.
The Christian migrants, said to be from Ghana and Nigeria, are all feared dead.
In a separate incident, more than 40 people drowned after another migrant boat sunk between Libya and Italy.
The boats are unsafe and horrifically overloaded. Be sure to see the BBC’s photo of the open boat literally packed solid with people.
In the latest sinking, the Italian navy plucked four survivors – a Ghanaian, two Nigerians, and a man from Niger – from the sea and took them to Sicily along with 600 other migrants trying to make the crossing in various vessels. They told the police their inflatable boat sank not long after leaving the coast of Libya with 45 people on board.
Meanwhile, police in Palermo say that 15 Muslim migrants, who travelled on another boat, were arrested on charges of “multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate”, after several surviving migrants came forward and told them of an altercation which resulted in 12 Christians being thrown overboard.
The men who have been charged come from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea.
More room in the boat for the survivors.