Migrant ship Aita Mari docks at Messina

(ANSA) - Messina, February 13 - The Spanish Aita Mari migrant rescue ship docked in Messina Thursday with 158 migrants it had rescued in two operations in the last few days.
    On Sunday it recovered 93 people, including 16 women, three of them pregnant, and 24 minors including 12 children.
    It subsequently rescued another drifting migrant boat with another 65 people on board.
    Migrant reception officials, officials from the city council, police HQ and the prefecture were waiting for the migrants as well as police officers. After checks and controls, the migrants are expected to be taken to the first-reception barracks Gasparro in Bisconte.
    The Senate on Wednesday voted to allow prosecutors to proceed against League leader Matteo Salvini for allegedly illegally detaining a group of migrants when he was interior minister in a previous government.
    The Upper House voted by 76 to 152 to reject a petition by Forza Italia and Brothers of Italy, Salvini's allies, to deny authorisation, with the League boycotting the vote.
    The case regards Salvini's decision to not allow more than 100 rescued migrants to disembark from the Gregoretti Coast Guard ship for several days during a long standoff in July.
    The Senate's immunity panel had already given the OK for the Catania court of ministers' request to parliament to proceed against Salvini for allegedly abusing his power and the floor of the Upper House has now ratified the decision to lift Salvini's parliamentary immunity.
    Salvini, who operated a closed ports policy while interior minister in the last government, sending the League's poll ratings sky-high, faced prosecution before but his parliamentary immunity was never lifted so he could go to trial in previous similar cases.
    "I'm absolutely relaxed about this and proud of what I did," Salvini told ANSA after the vote, which members of his party did not take part in.
    "I'll do it again as soon as I get back in government.
    "I swore on the Constitution, which says that defending the nation is every citizen's duty.
    "I defended Italy". Salvini argued that, as in other such cases, his decision was made with the rest of the government he was then part of.
    Premier Giuseppe Conte, on the other hand, said he was not involved in the specific decision of whether to allow the migrants to disembark.
    Salvini pulled the plug on Conte's first government in August prompting the creation of a new ruling majority.
    Asked if he was worried about becoming ineligible for office in the event of a conviction, Salvini said "absolutely not".
    He said he had "no back-up plan" for that eventuality.
    He said he had "absolute and total faith" in the Italian judiciary.
    "It seems to me that the Catania prosecutors themselves have said that the crime does not exist. I don't see any big problems. I'm not in the least bit worried," he told ANSA.
    Salvini, who risks 15 years for abuse of office and a 6-8 year office ban, faces another migrant 'kidnapping' case regarding the NGO Open Arms, which will come before a Senate immunity panel on February 27.
    Viti Crimi, interim leader of the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S), Salvini's former government partner, said "the League leader has been living in a confused state for months.
    "First he hailed his decision on the Gregoretti case, then he cried plot, saying it was an action promoted by the whole government.
    "First he says he wants to be tried, then he doesn't want to any more, and then he wants to again.
    "He has changed his mind so many times that it's impossible to understand what he really thinks about it", Crimi said in a post entitled "Only fleeing and lies from Salvini".
    The M5S, which was in government with Salvini for 14 months until he toppled it last July, is now in government with the centre-left Democratic Party (PD), ex-PD leader and former premier Matteo Renzi's centrist Italia Viva (IV) party, and the leftwing Free and Equal (LeU) party.
    Salvini recently endured a setback when the League failed to win another leftwing stronghold, Emilia Romagna, after taking Umbria from the centre-left last year.
    Salvini, a 46-year-old Milan native and former Communist in his teens, took over the League in 2013 when it was languishing at 4% in the polls and has boosted it to around 30%, the top-rating party in Italy, with a switch from a regionalist to a nationalist stance and his highly popular migrant and law-and-order policies.
    A new grassroots anti-populist movement, the Sardines, has packed out squares across Italy, starting in Bologna, in opposition to Salvini.
    Sardines leader Mattia Santori said the "veil" had been lifted from Salvini and there should now be "transparency on what happened under the Conte I government".
    Milan prosecutors are probing Salvini's former spokesman for allegedly receiving Russian funding in oil kickbacks.
    The number of migrants who crossed the central Mediterranean in January 2020 more than doubled that in December 2019, at around 1,500, six times what it was in January 2019, Frontex said Wednesday.
    The EU border agency said that migratory pressure in the central Med went against the trend in the other main routes, where it fell 58% in the eastern Med and by a quarter in the western Med.