Ocean Viking has left Toulon, landing of migrants completed

The Ocean Viking, a humanitarian ship chartered by the SOS Méditerranée NGO, left the Toulon military port with the 230 migrants on board disembarked on Friday evening, the Var prefecture told AFP on Saturday. Before leaving Libya again, the ship will stay in another French port for a technical stop for a few weeks. It is temporarily located in the port of La Seine-sur-Mer (Var)

After 20 days at sea in search of a safe port, the 234 migrants rescued by SOS Méditerranée between the coasts of Libya and Italy managed to disembark, 230 in the military port of Toulon on Friday and four in Corsica earlier. moved to the mainland.

189 of them, including 23 women and 13 minors, are now in the resort village of Jerez on the Giens Peninsula, which has been transformed into a “international lounge” is closed, created specifically so that they are not considered to be in France and from which they are prohibited from leaving before the initial assessment of their asylum application.

According to the prefecture, as of now, everyone has expressed their desire to comply with this request. Before then, they must pass security checks, notably by French domestic intelligence, before interviews with the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra), whose agents are expected on Saturday to check whether their profiles are compatible. .

Supported

On Friday morning, the first to be evacuated from the military port of Toulon due to health conditions, the 190th survivor was hospitalized. The 44 minors on boardan ocean vikingthe mostyoung teenagers“, said the prefect of Var Evens Richard, they were taken care of by the French social services and moved outside the Guines camp.

Two-thirds of the people, or 175, will leave France to move to eleven countries, including Germany, which is set to host around 80 countries, Luxembourg, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Lithuania, Malta, Portugal, Ireland, Finland and Norway. .

This is the first time that an ambulance ship operating off the coast of Libya landed survivors in France. For SOS Méditerranée, this situation “must not happen again” and the NGO will go to sea again.since more than 20,000 deaths have been recorded in the Mediterranean Sea since 2014, and we do not accept that this sea becomes a graveyard;“. Doctors Without Borders also noted that its lifeboat Geo Barents, will resume rescue operations. Since the beginning of the year, 1,891 migrants have disappeared in the Mediterranean Sea while trying to reach Europe, reports the International Organization for Migration (IOM).