Hundreds of mostly Syrian refugees rescued by a cruise liner in the Mediterranean disembarked in Cyprus on Friday, after hours of refusing to move and demanding to go to Italy.
On Thursday, 345 migrants, mainly women and children, had been plucked from a boat in trouble off the coast of Cyprus by the cruise ship.
Approximately 700 paying passengers disembarked from the liner at the port of Limassol, police said, but only 65 of those rescued at sea initially left the ship. The others refused to disembark, the shipping company said.
The situation was resolved shortly before dawn on Friday after police entered the vessel to talk to the remaining refugees, who finally agreed to leave, according to Marinos Papadopoulos, an interior ministry official.
“Everything went calmly,” he said. The refugees were to be taken by bus to a camp near Nicosia where they would be able to shower, get clean clothes and rest, according to the Red Cross.
The cruise ship had answered a distress signal from a trawler sailing 50 nautical miles off the Cyprus coast in poor weather conditions, the Cyprus defence ministry said.
The liner had been en route from the Greek island of Syros to Limassol when it received a call to assist in the rescue operation.
The Mediterranean has been plagued by shipwrecks in recent months involving migrants trying to reach Europe from Africa and the Middle East.
The UN high commissioner for refugees says more than 2,500 people have drowned or been reported lost at sea this year trying to cross the Mediterranean.
In one of the deadliest wrecks on record, a ship carrying about 500 migrants – including Syrians, Palestinians and Egyptians – was deliberately sunk by traffickers off Malta earlier this month, leaving just 10 known survivors.
Cyprus is 62 miles from the shores of war-ravaged Syria.
In August 2012, seven Syrians, including two children, drowned when the boat in which they were sailing to Cyprus to escape the conflict in their homeland sank off the island’s northern coast.