Italian authorities have intercepted a boatload of 32 people believed to be from Egypt as the wave of would-be immigrants from North Africa toward Italy’s shores continues.
The naval section of Italy’s financial police said it intercepted the boat off the coast of Ragusa, on the Sicilian mainland.
No boats arrived on the tiny island of Lampedusa further south, where more than 5,000 Tunisians have landed in recent days in an unintended consequence of the “people’s revolution” which ousted President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and inspired uprisings in Egypt and elsewhere.
Italy has demanded the European Union step in to deal with what one minister has called an exodus of biblical proportions.
