On April 3, Alarm Phone reported the presence of three boats in the Maltese Search and Rescue regions. The people on two of the boats were rescued and taken to Lampedusa. An estimated 110 people on the third boat appear to still be unaccounted for, what has happened?
Italian authorities say they have intercepted 187 migrants on three boats near the coast of Lampedusa and brought them to safety. The rescues come as the number of migrants risking the Mediterranean crossing to Europe is rising.
The mayor of the Lampedusa has said he is concerned over the "increasingly active" Libyan route to Italy. Migrant arrivals on the island continued on Saturday, Sunday and Monday with more than 400 people landing on the Italian island.
What happens to migrants who are rescued in the Mediterranean Sea and then brought to shore in Italy? InfoMigrants explains the procedure of fingerprinting, compulsory health quarantine, and the steps that follow.
Pietro Bartolo, a member of the European Parliament and for years the "doctor of migrants" who landed on the Italian island of Lampedusa, said Europe has the greatest responsibility for what is still happening in the Mediterranean and in Libya, and that it "doesn't do what it should do".
A memorial and a theater will be created at a former quarry on the Italian island of Lampedusa. The memorial will be dedicated to those who have lost their lives in the Mediterranean, especially the more than 360 migrants who died in the tragic October 2013 shipwreck.
It was a busy weekend in the central Mediterranean. The Spanish rescue organization Open Arms said that it had picked up 146 migrants in two separate rescue operations. Meanwhile, the Tunisian navy said that it had picked up 25 from a shipwreck, with one person confirmed dead and about 22 missing.
The humanitarian organization SOS Mediterranee said on Thursday that its crew had rescued 121 people, among them 19 women and two small children, from an overcrowded rubber boat off Libya. Another 140 migrants were returned to Libya by coast guards on Wednesday.
Italy failed to protect the right to life of over 200 migrants, including 60 children, who were aboard a boat that sank in the Mediterranean in 2013, according to the United Nations Human Rights Committee.
On Monday, January 25, 373 migrants on board the Ocean Viking were disembarked in the port of Augusta in Sicily. The migrants had been rescued from three different small boats in the space of 48 hours.
50 migrants, mostly from sub-Sahara Africa, were rescued by the Tunisian navy on Monday off the coast of Tunisia after five days at sea. One of their number, a new-born baby, was found dead as the authorities arrived.
A Tunisian boy with substantial paralysis was moved to a children's hospital in Rome this week. The seven-year-old had landed on the Italian island of Lampedusa with his father in November.