The full moon was the only light as a terrified 9-year-old boy from Central African Republic climbed into a rubber dinghy held together with duct tape, risking death in the dark waters off Libya along with his parents and 57 other trafficked migrants.
After a long night on the Mediterranean Sea, a Spanish rescue boat spotted them on the horizon after dawn.
“People were screaming, I was afraid,” said the boy, Krisley Dokouada. “But after seeing the rescue boat, I knew there was no more danger.”
Their savior Saturday was the Open Arms, which became the third rescue ship run by humanitarian aid groups to draw the ire of Italy’s anti-migrant interior minister, Matteo Salvini. He has vowed that Italy’s new populist government will no longer allow such rescue boats to dock in Italy, which has taken in hundreds of thousands of migrants rescued at sea in the last few years.
Malta then angrily rebuffed Salvini’s claim that the tiny Mediterranean nation was closest to the rescue ship and should give it safe harbor.
By nightfall Saturday, Spain agreed to let the Open Arms dock in Barcelona, where the humanitarian aid group which operates the vessel, Proactiva Open Arms, is based, the Spanish government said.
The Open Arms and its companion ship, the Astral, will likely need four days to reach Barcelona, said the Astral’s captain, Riccardo Gatti.
Also on Saturday, in an unrelated rescue much further west of the central Mediterranean where the Open Arms rescue took place, Spanish authorities reported saving 63 migrants trying to reach the country’s southern coast from North…
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