Port turns away ship carrying refugees

A German aid ship with 36 Sudanese and another rescued African that has been sailing southern Mediterranean waters for three weeks in search of a haven has been turned away from a Sicilian port today.

The Italian border police’s office in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, said earlier that police and coast guard craft were escorting the aid group Cap Anamur’s ship toward the port.

But an official in Porto Empedocle’s port inspection office said the ship was blocked when it was about 500 meters offshore because no authorisation had been granted.

Two coast guard motorboats were blocking the entrance to the port.

“This situation on board is not bearable any more,” Elias Bierdel, a Cap Anamur spokesman aboard the ship, said.

“The boat people are mentally and physically in a very bad state.”

Bierdel said the boat’s not being allowed to dock “proves which face Europe really shows.”

Cap Anamur, a Cologne, Germany-based group, said the Sudanese gave the boat’s captain a hand-written asylum application late Saturday and it was sent on to the German government.

Germany’s foreign ministry declined comment.

The ship, which belongs to the aid group Cap Anamur, came across a rubber dinghy on June 20 containing 36 Sudanese – many reportedly fleeing a humanitarian crisis in Darfur, Sudan – and a man from Sierra Leone, and picked up the passengers.

Italian authorities had said the refugees first passed through Malta and should have applied for asylum there – a position denounced by aid groups.

The German ship picked up the men 100 miles from the tiny Sicilian island of Lampedusa and 180 miles from Malta, according to Christopher Hein, director of the Italian Council for Refugees, said.

The ship then passed through Maltese waters, although it never stopped on the island, he said.