As she guided a ship carrying 40 rescued, increasingly desperate migrants into port on the island of Lampedusa, Capt. Carola Rackete did not fully realize that she had become one of Italy’s most polarizing figures over the previous two weeks. By docking after being told she should not, she had firmly landed in the sights of Italy’s powerful, nationalist interior minister, who described the event as an “act of war.” And then she was immediately arrested by the police. But Captain Rackete, 31, said she had been thinking about her passengers. “I was concerned for safety of the people who we had rescued,” she said in a telephone interview Friday.

Source: International New York Times July 05, 2019 23:14 UTC