06 October 2004	Wednesday	20 Shaban 1425

LAMPEDUSA, Oct 5: 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 organized Tuesday to bring immigrants back to Libya," Captain Giordano Crocifisso of the island's Carabinieri force said. The official 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 said on Monday that Italy was sending back only nationals from countries bordering Libya. Italy's largest opposition party, Democrats of the Left (DS), said on Tuesday that the "immigrants had been treated without the slightest respect for international conventions".

"Italy's reputation has been besmirched by an offense against human rights," said DS parliamentarian Pietro Folena. Lampedusa's sole reception centre for migrants housed more than 500 people on 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. -AFP