Italy’s coast guard rescued a second abandoned “ghost ship” adrift in the Adriatic on Friday as experts warned that people traffickers had adopted a dangerous new tactic to smuggle migrants into Europe.
Amid stormy weather, six Italian coast guard officers were lowered from a helicopter onto the deck of the Ezadeen after the merchant ship was abandoned by its crew.
The 240-ft vessel, originally designed to carry livestock, was packed with around 450 refugees. The ship was flying the flag of Sierra Leone, but registered to a Lebanese company, when it was discovered about 25 miles off the Italian coast.
Those on board are believed to be Syrians and the Ezadeen is thought to have begun its voyage in the Syrian port of Tartus.
There were dozens of women on board and around 60 children, who were “visibly distressed but overall in good medical condition”, said the Italian authorities.
The alarm was raised when one refugee managed to broadcast a message over the ship’s radio saying: “We are alone, there is no one – help us!”
The coast guard officers took control of the vessel and steered it towards a port in the southern region of Calabria.
The discovery of the ship was strikingly similar to the interception on Wednesday of another abandoned vessel, the Moldovan-registered Blue Sky M, which had no crew but nearly 1,000 refugees.
It had been set on auto-pilot and ran the risk of running aground, before the Italian coast guard managed to take control, delivering it to the port of Gallipoli.
After years of sending tens of thousands of migrants towards Italy and Malta in fishing boats and rubber dinghies, traffickers have hit on a new and even more cynical way of dispatching their human cargo towards Europe, experts said.
“We started to see the arrival of this type of cargo ship packed with refugees in the late autumn and since then there have been about 10 of them,” said Ewa Moncure, from Frontex, the EU’s border control agency.
“At first we wondered if it was a one-off, but it now seems to be a trend.
The smugglers typically acquire a decommissioned cargo ship, pack it with migrants and then abandon their passengers at sea, telling them to call the rescue services.
