A German cargo ship with 79 migrants on board is allowed to sail to Sicily. „We have the permission of the authorities, the ship is on the way to Sicily,“ said the shipping company owner Thies Klingenberg of dpa today. People should get out of there.
He couldn’t say exactly where the ship was to dock. A spokesman for the Interior Ministry in Rome confirmed that the “MV Marina” was allowed to go to Italy. The refugees would then have to be in coronavirus quarantine for two weeks.
Waited for days to assign a port
According to the shipping company, the merchant ship was on its way from Tunisia to Malta on Sunday when the Maltese authorities ordered it to participate in a rescue operation. After that, it waited for days to be assigned to a port. According to the shipping company, the situation on board had become extremely acute. The shipping company is located in Ellerbek near Hamburg in Schleswig-Holstein.
Malta and Italy had declared their ports „not safe“ in the corona virus crisis. People who are rescued by ships from distress could not be looked after there, it said.
