Frontex-deployed Norwegian vessel Siem Pilot helped rescue 487 of the 1200 people saved in the Central Mediterranean Sea over the weekend.
175 women and 15 children were among the migrants. The vessel will disembark in Reggio di Calabria tomorrow.
Siem Pilot was involved in five different search and rescue operations over the last weekend. The vessel is deployed in Italy as part in the Frontex-coordinated Operation Triton. The migrants, most of them from Nigeria, made distress calls to the Italian authorities shortly after leaving the Libyan coast. Most of them travelled on small and heavily overcrowded rubber boats.
Since the beginning of the year, 106 000 migrants were rescued in the Central Mediterranean, 6 percent fewer than in the same period of last year.