ROME (AP) — Italy's migration crisis took on a deadly new twist Thursday as police in Sicily reported that Muslim migrants had thrown 12 Christians overboard during a recent crossing from Libya, and an aid group said another 41 were feared drowned in a separate incident.

Palermo police said they had detained 15 people suspected in the high seas assault, which they learned of while interviewing tearful survivors from Nigeria and Ghana who had arrived in Palermo Wednesday morning after being rescued at sea by the ship Ellensborg.

The 15 were accused of multiple homicide aggravated by religious hatred, police said in a statement.

The survivors said they had boarded a rubber boat April 14 on the Libyan coast with 105 passengers aboard, part of the wave of migrants taking advantage of calm seas and warm weather to make the risky crossing from Libya, where most smuggling operations originate.

During the crossing, the migrants from Nigeria and Ghana — believed to be Christians — were threatened with being abandoned at sea by some 15 other passengers from the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Mali and Guinea Bissau.

Eventually the threat was carried out and 12 were pushed overboard. The statement said the motive was that the victims "professed the Christian faith while the aggressors were Muslim."

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Rescued migrants wait to disembark from an Italian Coast Guard ship in the harbor of Palermo, Sicily …

The surviving Christians, the statement said, only managed to stay on board by forming a "human chain" to resist the assault.

Earlier Thursday, the International Organization of Migration said four migrants who were picked up in recent days by the Italian Navy reported a shipwreck to aid workers after arriving in the Italian port of Trapani Thursday. Their boat had originally been carrying 45 people; the others are presumed dead.

The IOM said the migrants — two Nigerians, a Ghanaian and one Nigerien — were found floating in the sea by a helicopter and were rescued by the Italian Naval ship Foscari. They had left Tripoli in Libya on Saturday and stayed adrift for four days. The location of the rescue was not immediately known.

The new tragedies come just days after aid agencies reported 400 presumed dead in the sinking of another ship near the Libyan coast. The deaths have raised calls for a more robust search and rescue of the seas between Libya and Europe amid a surge in migration between the Middle East and Africa toward Italy.

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Colleen Barry contributed to this report from Milan.

Wochit
Russia Says U.S. Forced it to Act on Ukraine

By Gabriela Baczynska

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Top Russian officials accused the United States on Thursday of seeking political and military dominance and sought to put blame on the West for international security crises, including the conflict in east Ukraine.

Evoking Cold War-style rhetoric, Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu said a drive by the United States and its allies to bring Kiev closer to the West was a threat to Moscow and had forced it to react.

"The United States and its allies have crossed all possible lines in their drive to bring Kiev into their orbit. That could not have failed to trigger our reaction," he told an annual security conference in Moscow.

Echoing his comments, General Valery Gerasimov, chief of the General Staff of the Russian Armed Forces, told the meeting: "Considering themselves the winners of the Cold War, the United States decided to reshape the world to fit its needs.

"Aiming at complete dominance, Washington stopped taking into account the interests of other countries and respect international law."

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A woman walks past a building damaged by fighting in Donetsk April 15, 2015. Russia has repeatedly d …

Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine last March following what it says was an "unconstitutional coup" in which street protests toppled a Moscow-allied Ukrainian president in Kiev after he ditched a deal to move closer to the European Union.

Separatist unrest then spread to eastern, Russian-speaking regions of Ukraine where fighting between Kiev's troops and pro-Russian rebels has killed more than 6,000 people. The West says Moscow drives the rebellion.

President Vladimir Putin on Thursday repeated Moscow's denials, saying Russian military forces were not in Ukraine and denying that Russia was providing troops and support for the rebels in east Ukraine.

Shoigu blamed the violence on Kiev and sought to dismiss Western criticism that Russia was forcibly remaking European borders, pointing in turn to Western military involvement in Serbia, Iraq and Libya.

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the conference -- attended by envoys from China, Iran, Pakistan and some of Russia's regional allies -- that Kiev had to deliver on its obligations under peace agreements reached in Minsk to "safeguard unity of the Ukrainian state".

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A soldier of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic (DNR) stands guard on a street in the …

All three said Moscow saw the development of the U.S.-led NATO missile shield in Europe as tilting the post-war balance of power and a threat to Russia's strategic nuclear deterrent. Shoigu said Moscow was taking steps to counteract that.

NATO said that was "misleading and incorrect", reiterating the system was defensive and not aimed against Russia.

Gerasimov told delegates the eastward expansion of NATO posed another major threat to Russia and criticized the alliance for boosting military exercises involving eastern members.

"It's clear that measures taken by NATO to strengthen the bloc and increase its military capabilities are far from being defensive," he said.

NATO says intensified drills are aimed at reassuring eastern members worried by Moscow's policies on Ukraine and, more recently, intensified talk of its nuclear capabilities.

"This activity and this rhetoric do not contribute to transparency and predictability in the context of a dramatically changed security environment due to Russia's aggressive actions in Ukraine," NATO's spokeswoman Oana Lungescu said, commenting on the conference.

(Additional reporting by Adrian Croft in Brussels; Editing by Alison Williams)

The U.S. and its allies "have crossed all possible lines in their drive to bring Kiev into their orbit," an official said.
Cold War-style rhetoric

By Steve Scherer

CALTAGIRONE, Italy (Reuters) - Sixteen-year-old orphan Ishmael Bangura fled Sierra Leone in July when the Ebola virus killed eight members of his household.

On his way to Italy from Libya months later, his boat capsized. He survived by clinging to a rope lowered from a rescue vessel while dozens drowned in the sea below him.

Today Bangura is living in a shelter on this Sicilian hilltop town. He is part of a growing army of parentless child migrants that are washing up on Europe's shores, giving the continent's immigration crisis a tragic new face.

"I'm happy to be alive," said the soft-spoken Bangura on a recent morning as he sat in the shelter's front yard.

The number of migrants reaching Italy by sea this year is set to top last year's record of 170,000, the International Organization for Migration said. In the past week alone 10,000 have arrived. Another 400 people drowned before making it to Italy's shores, survivors said.

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Adolescent migrants argue during a protest in a courtyard at an immigration centre in Caltagirone, S …

The number of minors traveling alone in this mass migration has soared -- underage arrivals to Italy tripled in 2014 from the previous year.

This poses a particular problem for frontier countries like Italy, Spain and Greece. Italy, by law, cannot repatriate minors and is required to provide healthcare and schooling.

Host countries are already under strain. In Italy, 13,000 teenagers -- mostly young men fleeing conflict, poverty or persecution -- now live in Italian immigration centers, alongside adult shelters that are bursting at the seams with some 80,000 people.

The numbers are expected to rise because of the world's demographic boom. There are more 10-to 24-year-olds now than at any other time in human history, mostly living in poor countries, according to the United Nations Population Fund.

"The Mediterranean will continue to be a heavily trafficked and deadly space," said Maurizio Albahari, professor at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, and author of a soon-to-be published book called "Crimes of Peace: Mediterranean Migrations and the World's Deadliest Border".

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Adolescent migrants pray at an immigration centre in Caltagirone, Sicily, March 18, 2015. The number …

Facing this prospect, Italy is trying to introduce a long-term system for sheltering and integrating waves of future minors. It is tapping European Union funds to open up new shelters to be monitored by humanitarian groups that seek to help integrate the youngsters.

There is resistance. Some right-wing politicians, particularly in the wealthy north of Italy, are pushing back against opening shelters in their regions. Just this week, Lombardy and Veneto, northern regions that are governed by the anti-immigration Northern League, said they would not accept any new migrants.

ITALIAN SHELTERS

The rise in migrants in the Mediterranean this year is largely the result of political instability in Somalia and Eritrea and the recent breakdown of order in Libya, in addition to the civil war in Syria.

Financial concerns prompted Italy last year to halt a permanent search-and-rescue mission called Mare Nostrum. But coast guard and navy officials in southern Italy are still rescuing migrants daily lest they die in rough waters.

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Adolescent migrants Mustafa (2nd R) from Gambia and, Ishmael (R) from Sierra Leone stand in a courty …

Italy separates unaccompanied minors from adults in its shelters. But many of the shelters for younger migrants have lacked in specialized personnel, including interpreters or Italian teachers. They have provided little more than a bed, a meal and some cheap clothes.

"The manner in which we took in more than 14,000 minors last year makes me ashamed to be an Italian," Mario Morcone, the chief administrator for immigration at the Interior Ministry, told a parliamentary committee last month.

Italy is trying to turn things around. In March, the state completed a 13-million-euro tender for 10 new "first shelter" centers, where a maximum of 50 minors are housed and given basic healthcare and language classes for up to 90 days. A tender for 10 more is underway.

After staying in the "first shelter", the minors are due to go to a "community" of 12 children where they enroll in school and participate in activities including soccer. Italian courts assign guardians to the children, who are legally required to stay in the communities until they are 18.

"We are building the future of our country because we have before us a mix of peoples who now live here, who want to live here, and who want to contribute," said Daniele Cutugno, a psychologist who runs the shelter where Bangura lives.

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An adolescent migrant stands in his bedroom at an immigration centre in Caltagirone, Sicily, March 1 …

Domenico Manzione, undersecretary for immigration at the Interior Ministry, said new communities for some 1,000 minors should soon be set up, though he said more will be needed.

"There is no hiding the fact that we are facing a task that is far from simple because the number of arrivals is putting pressure on structures that are already strained," Manzione told Reuters.

BUILDING A FUTURE

The shelter where Bangura and 55 other African boys live is on the outskirts of Caltagirone, a city of fewer than 40,000 known for its ceramic industry. It is a refurbished, two-storey stone villa with sprawling grounds.

Most of the boys there did not plan to come to Italy, and each has his own tragic reason for seeking out a future far from home at an age when teenagers in the West are occupied with video games and driving lessons.

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A view of Caltagirone in Sicily, March 18, 2015. The number of migrants reaching Italy by sea this y …

Abubacarr Dibba, 17, said he left Gambia when his father died and his family lost its land. Mustapha Kanteh, now 18, also left Gambia when his father died and a local chieftain beat him with a metal pipe and threatened to kill him.

Every young man said he had been beaten and imprisoned. Bangura said he still suffers headaches from being struck by a pistol handle in Libya.

Bangura said that when he reached Libya, he was kidnapped for two weeks, while his captor tried to extort a ransom from purported relatives. He was then sent to jail, before being put on a boat to Italy. Bangura said he now fasts, prays and waits.

"I didn't know anything about Italy before coming. Now I want to spend my life here. I'm here for help. Whatever the Italians do I'll be patient until they can help me."

(Reporting by Steve Scherer, Editing by Alessandra Galloni and Angus MacSwan)

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Kiev (AFP) - About 300 US paratroopers arrived this week in Ukraine to train the Ukrainian National Guard which is fighting pro-Russian rebels in the east, the US Army said in a statement.

The troops from the 173rd Airborne Brigade arrived on Tuesday and Wednesday in Yavoriv, western Ukraine, to spend six months training three battalions of Ukrainian troops, said the statement dated Thursday.

The move is likely to anger Russia, which accuses the United States of backing the protests that brought down the pro-Russian president Victor Yanukovych last year, sparking conflict between those loyal to Kiev and Moscow.

The West accuses Russia of arming the separatists who have taken control of some areas in eastern Ukraine, a charge that Moscow denies.

Fighting between the separatists and Ukrainian troops is rumbling on in the east despite a February ceasefire agreement.

The conflict has so far claimed more than 6,000 lives, according to the United Nations.

The US troops will train the National Guard of Ukraine (NGU), a reservist force reformed in 2014 to bring volunteers and militia under government control.

"We will be conducting classes on war-fighting functions, as well as training to sustain and increase the professionalism and proficiency of military staffs," Major Jose Mendez, operations officer for the brigade, which is based in Italy, said in the statement.