Nearly half the migrants aboard a Spanish migrant transport NGO vessel stuck off the coast of Sicily by Italian authorities jumped overboard in a bid to reach Italian shores.

The Spanish NGO Open Arms has had it ship stuck off the Sicilian coast for several days near Palermo waiting for Italian authorities to grant their vessel port access to drop off the 275 migrants on board.

In the last several days, over 100 of those migrants wearing life jackets decided to jump overboard in a bid to be reach the shores of Sicily, Italian newspaper Il Giornalereports.

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Populist Senator Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League (Lega) party, commented on the arrival of the Spanish NGO ship, saying: “Only words have come from [the European Union], but the certainty is that at the moment there are 2,000 illegal immigrants onboard cruise ships off Sicily, at the expense of the Italians, and another 275 are arriving aboard a ship of a Spanish NGO since they were rejected by Malta. Italy cannot be Europe’s refugee camp.”

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