(AFP) Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini said Thursday that he had told Germany to deal with a ship run by a German charity carrying dozens of migrants picked up in the Mediterranean, while denouncing the work of NGOs in the region.
“The ship is German property, with a German flag and a German crew … It’s their problem, they must deal with it,” Salvini said on the sidelines of a meeting of G7 interior ministers in Paris.
He said he had personally written to the captain of the Alan Kurdi, operated by the Sea-Eye charity, warning him the ship would “not enter Italian territorial waters.”
The ship on Wednesday rescued 64 people, including women and children, from an inflatable raft after efforts to contact the Libyan coastguard failed.
