ROME (AP) – Italy bid farewell Friday to the first 19 of an estimated 160,000 refugees who are due to be resettled throughout Europe as part of the EU’s new redistribution program aimed at moving asylum-seekers out of hard-hit receiving countries.
An Italian police aircraft carrying the 19 Eritreans took off from Rome’s Ciampino airport and headed to Lulea, in the far north of Sweden just south of the Arctic Circle, where Swedish officials will begin registering them and processing their asylum requests.
Sweden’s immigration agency said the 14 men and five women, between age 25 and 40, were selected because they have a chance of being granted asylum, and because they had family or other connections to Sweden.
Bundled in flannel shirts and jackets, they smiled and waved as they climbed up the stairs to the aircraft while officials from Italy, the U.N. refugee agency and Red Cross waved from the tarmac.
A significant number of the people making dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea are from Eritrea, an authoritarian country in northeast Africa.