Around 730 migrants arrived at the Sicilian port of Augusta on board an Italian coastguard ship on Saturday, including a large number of pregnant women and unaccompanied children.
They were some of the 2,750 boat migrants rescued from the Mediterranean in the past five days.
Marco Rotunno, a spokesman for the United Nations refugee agency, said that there were many different nationalities on board including people from Nigeria, Eritrea and Sudan as well as Syria.
Many of the migrants are pregnant women and children. /CFP Photo
"We have seen many women, around 100 women and most of them are alone and some of them are with their kids also small kids. There are around 20 pregnant women, one of them was about to give birth, she's a Syrian so she was transferred to Lampedusa by helicopter to give birth," said Rotunno.
He said the coastguard vessel had also brought an alarmingly large number of unaccompanied children.
"There are also many, many non-accompanied minors, there are around 75 non-accompanied minors and 15 of them are girls," said Rotunno.
Migrants disembark from Dattilo coast guard vessel in the Sicilian harbour of Augusta, Italy on February 25, 2017. /CFP Photo
Since the beginning of the year, there have been more than 10,700 sea arrivals, according to the Italy's Interior Ministry, a third higher than the same period last year.
Last year a record 181,000 boat migrants reached Italy and more than 5,000 died in the Mediterranean. Since 2015, more than a million-and-a-half migrants have come to Europe.
To stop the flow, Italy and the European Union earlier this month pledged to fund migrant camps in Libya run by the UN-backed government, and to supply equipment and training for the fight against people smugglers.
(Source: Reuters)
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