ROME (AP) — Italian coast guard and navy vessels on Saturday ferried hundreds of rescued migrants toward shore, while elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea thousands of migrants overflowed from a shelter on a tiny tourist island.
The influx of sea arrivals came in the face of a crackdown by Italy's right-wing government on people smugglers announced only two days earlier.
The coast guard said in a statement that overcrowding on two vessels and adverse sea and weather conditions had complicated rescue operations that began Friday in the Ionian Sea off Calabria.
A 94-meter-long coast guard vessel took 584 migrants aboard, while two smaller coast guard motorboats took on 379 and then transferred them to an Italian naval vessel, which was headed to Augusta, a port in eastern Sicily, as migrant shelters in Calabria quickly filled up.
Separately, a boat carrying 487 people, intercepted by Italian vessels some 60 nautical miles (112 kilometers) off Crotone in Calabria on Friday, was aided by two coast guard motorboats and a border police boat. The migrants disembarked in Crotone's port before dawn on Saturday.
A beach in Cutro, a town south of Crotone, is where survivors and bodies were found on Feb. 26 after a wooden boat, crowded with migrants who had set out from Turkey days earlier, broke apart on a sandbank.
The known death toll from the shipwreck climbed to 76 on Saturday after the bodies of two children and an adult were…
