Three Tunisians suspected of being migrant traffickers were arrested in Italy , local media reported on Monday.
Aged 32, 24, and 19, the three men were brought to jail in Ragusa, Sicily, on charge of favoring irregular immigration, according to AGI news agency.
They had reached the Sicilian port of Pozzallo on Saturday on board of a rescue ship of Italy’s finance police operating within EU new border control mission Themis in the Mediterranean.
Overall, some 86 people were saved in that operation, and all of them were believed to have started their journey towards Europe from the coasts of Tunisia.
Each of them would have paid some 1,500 euros (about 1,860 U.S. dollars) for the Mediterranean crossing, AGI also reported citing testimonies of the migrants.
The three suspects arrested would have been directly linked to the ring managing the trafficking in Tunisia, police in Sicily said.
Italy registered 4,864 arrivals between January 1 and February 19, over 72 percent of which from the Libyan coasts, statistics by the Italian Interior Ministry showed. The figure marked a 51.6 percent decrease against the same period of last year.
TunisianMonitorOnline
