On 18 January a shipwreck 45 miles away from Tripoli provoked the death of 117 persons and in the previous days other 53 persons died in Ahlborn Sea between Spain and Morocco. After desperate distress calls and no answer from Tripoli, the Italian navy rescued with a helicopter 3 survivors to the first shipwreck of 2019. The Italian navy talked about another 117 persons missing. Almost simultaneously the NGO Sea Watch’s vessel rescued other 47 migrants and on 20 January “Alarm Phone” denounced that other 100 people were in danger, in the waters in front of Misurata. First, the Libyan Navy declared that they had no available rescue vessels, later on they sent a cargo ship (that flies the Sierra Leone flag) to rescue them, as the Italian press reported. The Italian Minister of Interior/ Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini blamed NGOs and the traffickers of human beings for what happened insisting in his “closed ports” line. On the other hand, a number of NGOs declared that what happened is a European crime and denounced the absence of a genuine European rescue program in the Mediterranean, the blocked vessel of the NGO Open Arms in Barcelona and the difficulties of NGO Sea Eye’s vessel to find a port to change the crew.