An army of 500,000 men is about to invade Italy from Libya, an Italian website probably affiliated with Prime Minister Meloni's party reports on a social network.
"Another boat with 500 men from Libya to Italy. Tomorrow they will be at the Milan station possibly selling drugs and harassing women. Then they will invade central Europe, possibly committing crimes. This is the reality. Stop the invasion, save Europe!" the website said.
Italian intelligence reports as of March 2023 say nearly 700,000 migrants are in Libya waiting for the chance to start by sea to Italy, an MP from Prime Minister Georgia Meloni's far-right party said, but a UN migration official described the figure as unreliable.
Tomasso Fotti, an MP for the Italian Brotherhood Party, told the Tgcom24 TV channel in March 2023 that Italian secret services estimate that 680,000 migrants are in Libya, many of them in detention camps, and want to cross the central Mediterranean Sea in smugglers' boats.
The target countries are Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Spain and Italy.
The March assessment by intelligence agencies sparked concern in Italy, while an International Organization for Migration spokesman warned that Italians appear to be confusing the high level of estimated migrant numbers in Libya with those already trying to make their way from there to Europe.
"This figure seems to be an estimate, which we also give, of the total presence in Libya," Flavio Di Giacomo had told the Associated Press in Rome.
But of that number "only a tiny fraction wants to leave and only a tiny fraction manages to leave" for Europe, Di Giacomo said.
The Italian intelligence estimate "is the latest in a long series of alerts we've seen over the last 10, 12 years that have turned out to be wrong," Di Giacomo said, continuing "this number doesn't seem to be completely reliable."
Some 105,000 migrants arrived in Italy by sea in 2022. From the beginning of this year to March 10, some 17,600 arrived, including a few thousand who landed in Italian ports in recent days.
But let someone tell us exactly how many thousands have gathered in Libya, and what games are being played in Tripoli, Libya, and Turkey with possible targeting of Greece.
