Italy halted its controversial mass expulsions of immigrants to Libya on Tuesday, an official here said, after a welter of criticism from opposition parties and human rights organisations.
"There were no flights organised Tuesday to bring immigrants back to Libya," Captain Giordano Crocifisso of the island's Carabinieri force told AFP.
The officer gave no reason for the sudden halt, imposed after 11 planeloads of illegal immigrants were unceremoniously expelled since Friday without being given time to lodge appeals for asylum.
Crocifisso has been dispatched to this remote island outpost of Europe closest to Africa to take command of the crisis which has seen more than 1,300 would-be illegal immigrants land here in the past few days.
Most have been sent directly back to Libya, where Italy believes they had come from, in a controversial drive by the authorities in Rome. Libya has reportedly agreed to repatriate them to their countries of origin.
For this reason, an official on the island told AFP on Monday that Italy was sending back only nationals from countries bordering Libya.
Italy's largest opposition party, Democrats of the Left (DS) said Tuesday that the "immigrants had been treated without the slightest respect for international conventions."
"Italy's reputation has been besmirched by an offence against human rights," said DS parliamentarian Pietro Folena.
Meanwhile, Lampedusa's sole reception centre for migrants housed more than 500 people Tuesday, more than double its capacity, its director Claudio Scalia said. Migrants are given first aid and basic shelter at the centre after an often exhausting sea trip aboard dangerously leaky boats.
Juergen Humburg of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) agency left the island on Tuesday having failed since Saturday to gain access to the migrants at the centre.
"The interior ministry has not formally rejected our demands to be able to visit, it didn't even respond. After four days waiting, we consider that to be a de facto refusal," a disappointed Humburg told AFP.
"We are concerned because among the people who have been sent back, there were some who would perhaps have had the right to lodge a request for political asylum," he said.
"We don't know either what happened to these people after their return to Libya but this country has not signed the Geneva Convention on Refugees and does not offer the necessary guarantees," he added.
Humburg said the Italian authorities appeared to have recently hardened their attitude towards his organisation. The UNHCR had previously had no problems gaining access to immigrants in centres, he said.
"Then in July, for the first time we were unable to see illegal immigrants brought in by the (German aid ship) Cap Anamur. But we thought that was an exception."
Lampedusa coastguard commander Michele Niosi said the situation appeared to have "stabilised", following an agreement by the Tunisian navy to intercept a migrant vessel in international waters Monday at the request of Rome's interior ministry. That vessel was reported to be carrying would-be illegal immigrants.
He said a new international initiative "Neptune 3" - comprising patrol ships and planes from Italy and Malta, with observers from Slovenia, Spain and Britain, would help stop the clandestine crossings.
"They are patrolling 50 miles from the Tunisian coast and 50 miles from the coast of Malta, and haven't detected any clandestines," Niosi told.