Armed forces take back ship hijacked by migrants and escort boat to Malta

A special forces team boarded a tanker hijacked by migrants rescued at sea, and returned it to a Maltese port.

Armed troops stood guard on the ship’s deck, and a dozen or so migrants were also visible, as the vessel docked in the city of Senglea.

Several police vans were lined up on shore to take custody of the migrants for investigation, and four were led off the ship in handcuffs.

Authorities in Italy and Malta on Wednesday said that the group had hijacked the Turkish oil tanker El Hiblu 1 after it rescued them in the Mediterranean Sea, and forced the crew to put the Libya-bound vessel on a course north towards Europe.

Italian interior minister Matteo Salvini said the ship had rescued about 120 people and described what happened as ‘the first act of piracy on the high seas with migrants’ as the alleged hijackers.

The ship had been heading towards Italy’s southernmost island of Lampedusa and the island of Malta when Maltese forces intercepted it.

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Troops established communications with the captain while the ship was still 30 nautical miles off shore. The captain told them he was not in control of the vessel ‘and that he and his crew were being forced and threatened by a number of migrants to proceed to Malta’.

The special forces team that restored control to the captain was backed by a patrol vessel, two fast interceptor craft and a helicopter.

Humanitarian organisations say migrants are mistreated and even tortured in Libya, and have protested over protocols to return migrants rescued offshore to the lawless northern African nation.

Italy and Malta have refused to open their ports to humanitarian ships that rescue migrants at sea, which has created numerous standoffs as European governments haggle over which will take them in.

Mass migration to Europe has dropped sharply since 2015, when the continent received a million refugees and migrants from countries in the Middle East, Asia and Africa.

The surge created a humanitarian crisis in which desperate travellers frequently drowned and leading arrival spots such as Italy and Greece struggled to house large numbers of asylum-seekers.

Along with the dangerous sea journey itself, those who attempt to cross the Mediterranean risk being stopped by Libya’s coastguard and held in Libyan detention centres that human rights groups have described as bleak places where migrants allegedly suffer routine abuse.

EU members ‘alert the Libyan coastguard when refugees and migrants are spotted at sea so they can be taken back to Libya, despite knowing that people there are arbitrarily detained and exposed to widespread torture, rape, killings and exploitation’, said Matteo de Bellis, an international migration researcher for Amnesty International.