ABSTRACT
In the early hours of the morning, people in Italy, as on the Mediterranean island of Malta, were fast asleep, dreaming perhaps of the presents and feasts that awaited them in the hours that lay ahead. But in the stretch of sea between their two countries, hundreds of Indians, Pakistanis, and Sri Lankans were being loaded onto a former RAF patrol boat, the F174—it was never given any other name—which had slipped out of a Maltese port the night before. The job of the F174 was to carry the Asians—clandestine migrants—from a freighter, the Honduras-registered Yiohan, into the shallower waters around the Sicilian port of Portopalo.
