Last week police in Milan arrested a 22-year-old Moroccan after Tunisian authorities demanded his extradition on grounds that he had participated in the heinous terrorist attack on the Bardo Museum. The youth protests his innocence, and authorities here are uncertain. The risk is that such incidents overshadow the plight of thousands of innocent migrants.
These horror stories overshadow the plight of the vast majority of migrants, “that 70% who are fleeing certain death while knowing that they risk a probable death while crossing the desert and the sea,” in the words of Monsignor Domenico Mogavero, who is bishop of Mazara del Vallo in Sicily. Mons. Mogavero knows of what he speaks: Mazara is one of Italy’s coastal towns closest to Libya, only 100 nautical miles distant, and is regularly flooded with migrants.