A total of 702 asylum-seekers including nine pregnant women and "many" children arrived in the western Sicilian port city of Trapani overnight after being rescued off the Libyan coast, Italian coastguard said on Tuesday.
The asylum-seekers, said to be mainly from Eritrea, Somalia and Uganda, were plucked from the southern Mediterranean by a ship owned by the Doctors without Borders medical charity in two separate operations coordinated by Italian coastguard.
Under an Italian interior ministry plan, most of the asylum-seekers will be transferred to north and northeast Italy while 103 will be relocated to the central Tuscany region and 71 to the southern Campania and Basilicata regions.
The remaining 99 asylum-seekers will remain in the province of Trapani.
Around 132,000 refugees and migrants have reached Italy so far this year, according to the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR. Italy and Greece are the first countries of entry for the majority of migrants and refugees crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe, where over half a million people have landed so far this year.
On Friday, 19 asylum-seekers, including five women, all Eritrean nationals, were flown to Sweden from Rome, marking the start of a controversial plan agreed last month by European Union heads of government to redistribute 160,000 people from Italy and Greece within the bloc over the next two years.
