"Italian police arrested 15 Muslim migrants who survivors said tossed 12 Christians from a boat during a recent Mediterranean crossing attempt. In a separate incident, 41 migrants were feared drowned as the situation in the region intensifies.
The Muslim migrants involved in the clash with Christians were arrested in the Sicilian city of Palmero and charged with "multiple aggravated murder motivated by religious hate," police said in a statement Thursday, according to the BBC. The victims were from Nigeria and Ghana. The suspects were from Ivory Coast, Mali and Senegal.
Police learned of the incident through interviews with survivors, who said they boarded a rubber boat Tuesday off the Libyan coast with 105 passengers aboard, the Associated Press reported. The surviving Christians were able to remain onboard only by forming a "human chain" to resist the assault, police said.
[snip]
Since the beginning of this year, about 31,500 people have made the crossing to Italy and Greece — the two largest countries receiving refugees, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). As sea and weather conditions improve, the number of migrants attempting to make the journey has been picking up and is expected to climb further, the UNHCR said.
Last year, about 219,000 refugees and migrants — many fleeing conflicts in Africa, Syria and Iraq — crossed the Mediterranean. At least 3,500 died, the UNHCR reported. Exact death tolls are hard to determine because in many cases bodies are not found in the water and the death tolls are based off survivor accounts or reports by family members."
Quite interesting, much like Cubans escaping Castro's Communist paradise, North Africans are risking their lives and serious injury to leave their home Muslim countries and fleeing to what is, nominally anyway, Christian Europe. Murdering a few Christians along the way is only icing on the cake, though I do wonder if the peoples of Europe are thinking about what kind of immigrants are arriving.
"This is the most lavishly funded and entirely moronic foreign ministry on the planet."~~Mark Steyn's description of the US State Dept.