Palermo (Italy), June 10 (IANS/AKI) A boat belonging to medical charity Doctors without Borders docked in the Sicilian port city on Friday with 592 people on board including 119 women and nine children.
Four of the female migrants who reached Palermo were pregnant and some of the children had travelled without an adult. Seven of the migrants were taken to hospitals in the city with minor ailments, doctors said.
The passengers were among 2,000 migrants rescued on Thursday in the Mediterranean from 15 boats. Many thousands more have been rescued in recent weeks and hundreds are believed to have perished in a spate of shipwrecks.
Italy's Prime Minister Matteo Renzi denied on Thursday that Italy was being "invaded" by the ongoing influx of migrants seeking to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa.
"The numbers speak for themselves. There is no invasion of our country. Last year 51,000 people had landed in Italy by June 8 compared with 48,000 this year," Renzi wrote on his Facebook page.
But Renzi admitted that "demographic pressures" in Africa were a problem that could only be resolved in the medium-to-long term.
European Union ministers were on Friday due to look at ways of stemming the flow of migrants who attempt dangerous journeys to Europe from lawless Libya and elsewhere in north Africa.
