The photo, taken on November 4, 2016, shows migrants and refugees sitting on a rubber boat as Libyan coastguards help them during a rescue operation off the Libyan coast. (Photo by AFP)
Italian police broke up a gang including suspects with extremist sympathies who charged migrants thousands of euros to rush them in speedboats across the Mediterranean from Tunisia, officials said Tuesday.
Officers arrested 13 Italian, Tunisian and Moroccan suspects in a dawn raid on the network accused of trafficking people and contraband cigarettes, a police spokesman told AFP.
The traffickers brought refugees from Nabeul in north-eastern Tunisia to Trapani on the west coast of Sicily, police said in a separate statement.
The gang would bring between 10 and 15 people a time, earning up to 70,000 euros per four-hour crossing, with hundreds of kilos of contraband cigarettes also stashed in the boats.
The police statement said that "some members" of the network had extremist sympathies, showing "hostile attitudes to Western culture" and "spreading propaganda via fake profiles on social media."
The photo shows a police officer using a metal detector to check a man as he disembarks from the patrol vessel Fiorillo of the Italian Coast Guard after it arrived in the port of Pozzallo on August 7, 2015. (Photo by AFP)
In a wiretapped telephone conversation, one of the gang's associates asked fellow members to pray for him while he went to France to carry "dangerous actions, after which he might not be able to return."
Since the summer of 2017, Italy has seen a rise in Tunisian migrants arriving in Sicily or on the island of Lampedusa, despite a repatriation agreement with the Tunisian government.
The Italian Interior Ministry says 6,000 Tunisians landed in 2017 and more than 1,300 have arrived since the start of this year.
That number however does not include the so-called "ghost landings," of which the only trace is wet clothes found on the beaches of western Sicily.
