Out of the hold of the Ezadeen, 360 Syrians emerged, towed to shore after smugglers abandoned the controls • Abandoned migrant ship arrives in Italy

The man on crutches from Homs was in no doubt about the message he wanted to send to the world.

While he waited to be handed a bag of food and a bottle of water in this southern Italian port, he turned to the handful of reporters left on the quayside and shouted in a loud and resonant voice: “Italia – good. Thank you, Italia. Thank you very much. All Italia … Good!”

Minutes before, he and 359 others had disembarked from the Ezadeen, a Sierra Leone-registered livestock freighter. Police said on Saturday that the number included 54 women, several pregnant, and 74 minors, including eight who were unaccompanied.

As the Tyr – the Icelandic coastguard patrol vessel that had towed the ship to safety – pulled it alongside the wharf, a restrained cheer rippled from bow to stern of the Ezadeen.

Double lines of metal bars run either side of the battered old freighter to prevent cattle and sheep from falling overboard. Those of the Ezadeen’s human cargo who were still massed in the livestock hold waved and grinned through the bars. If ever a moment captured the indignities suffered by those who try to flee across the Mediterranean to safety or a better life, this was it.

The first sign of the Ezadeen’s arrival had come more than an hour earlier when the Tyr’s three masthead lights, signalling a long tow, appeared beyond the mole that forms one half of the entrance to Corigliano’s spacious harbour. The Icelandic vessel soon became a dramatic sight – its engine exhaust smoke lit by a searchlight facing aft and trailing behind it like a silvery pennant.

The Ezadeen had first been located on Thursday 40 nautical miles off Cape Leuca, the very tip of the heel of the Italian boot, its crew having relinquished control of the vessel in perilous seas. Whether they left the ship is uncertain.

The prefect of nearby Cosenza told reporters on Saturday that, according to some of the migrants, the crew wore masks throughout the voyage. That would have allowed them to mingle undisturbed with the people who disembarked at Corigliano.

In an operation fraught with danger, an Italian air force helicopter lowered six coastguards on to the deck of the Ezadeen so that they could regain command of the vessel. But the ship had run out of fuel, and in another risky exercise in high seas and icy winds, the crew of the Tyr succeeded in attaching a line to the freighter.

The patrol vessel is part of Iceland’s contribution to Operation Triton, mounted by the European Union’s border control agency, Frontex, at Italy’s request. Though Iceland is not a member of the EU, it is a full member of the Schengen area whose frontiers Frontex manages.

Most, if not all, of the Ezadeen’s “passengers” were from Syria. Giovanna di Benedetto, a spokeswoman for Save the Children in Italy, who arranged for an Arabic speaker to talk to the migrants, said: “They left 10 days ago from Mersin in Turkey and they remained about five days without food, without drink and they told us that the crossing was very, very difficult and very, very dangerous.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The scene at the harbourside in Corigliano after the Ezadeen docked early on Saturday morning. Photograph: Francesco Arena/EPA

Mersin was also the port of departure indicated by several of those queuing on the quayside. But the prefect said that at least some of the migrants had flown from Lebanon to Turkey and departed from Antalya on 31 December.

Both accounts were consistent with tracking data that showed the vessel moving westwards along the southern Turkish coast before heading towards Greece and then on to Italy.

The arrival of the Ezadeen, and the earlier rescue of another freighter, the Blue Sky M, carrying almost 800 Syrians, has dumped on Europe’s doorstep, more resoundingly and awkwardly than ever before, the desperate human consequences of the Arab spring.

Those in Europe calling for curbs on immigration might cavil about the waves of migrants reaching Italy’s southernmost islands from Libya and Tunisia. Some do indeed come for a better life, rather than to escape death or persecution. There are plenty of in-between cases: is a young man fleeing military service for the dictatorship in Eritrea, for example, truly a refugee?

But the man with the injured foot from Homs and others waiting by the quayside in the early hours of Saturday would seem cut-and-dried cases. Asked where they were from, one group of young men shouted “Kobani”.

Something else differentiated the Syrians on the Ezadeen from the woebegone, mostly African migrants who reach Lampedusa and Pantelleria. It is perhaps an odd epithet to use, but they looked distinctly middle-class.

A couple of the women standing with their husbands on the ship, watching it dock, might have been shopping in the nearest mall. A pale-faced young woman in a knitted woolly hat with earmuffs and drawstrings would not have looked out of place in a London or Paris antiques market.

But then, and by their own accounts, in snatched conversations in the port, the voyagers on the Ezadeen had spent $5,000 (£3,260) a head for their passage. That is roughly three times the going rate for a place on an inflatable dinghy for the even more dangerous crossing from north Africa.

Accounts from the port of Gallipoli, further east, where the Syrians on the Moldovan-registered Blue Sky M came ashore, spoke of engineers and chemists. Several of those who left the Ezadeen admitted to being students, but were reluctant to say more before they were hustled towards the marquees erected by the emergency services.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A man waits as the Ezadeen docks in Corigliano. Photograph: Antonino D'Urso/AP

The reception of irregular migrants is a far bigger and more complex operation than the TV images show. At the port in Corigliano, there were half a dozen ambulances, several fire brigade vehicles, numerous police cars, a lighting gantry, lines of tents, mobile offices and toilets, Red Cross paramedics, civil protection volunteers, revenue guards, semi-militarised carabinieri, police from three different forces, harbour officials, doctors and nurses kitted out in overalls and masks, naval officers and a priest. The cost must have run to thousands, if not tens of thousands, of euros.

Italy has performed a double U-turn in its policy towards seaborne migration in the past four years. While the former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi was still in power, migrants – including many deserving of humanitarian protection – were intercepted off the shores of Libya in particular and returned to the tender mercies of the Gaddafi regime. Italy’s next government put an end to this “push-back” approach, technically known as refoulement, in 2012.

The following year, after more than 300 migrants died off Lampedusa and Pope Francis made an impassioned appeal for tolerance, Rome launched Mare Nostrum, a proactive search-and-rescue operation in which Italian naval vessels hunted for migrants in distress up to the edge of Libyan territorial waters.

The effects of Operation Mare Nostrum are highly contentious. It coincided with an upsurge in the numbers of people reaching Italy by sea. But was it the cause of the exodus, as Berlusconi’s followers and his former supporters in Matteo Renzi’s left-right coalition maintain? Or did it just happen to be launched as numbers surged because of the deteriorating security conditions in Libya and a pile-up of refugees fleeing from Syria and Iraq?

Renzi’s interior minister, Angelino Alfano, once Berlusconi’s justice minister, backed the first explanation and began to phase out Mare Nostrum from 1 November. It has been replaced by the EU’s Operation Triton, which has a budget less than a third of the reported cost of Mare Nostrum, and a remit to ensure “effective border control” in the Mediterranean, with “persons and vessels in distress” as a secondary consideration.

This is the other significance of last week’s dramas on board the Ezadeen and Blue Sky M: they have highlighted more starkly than before the people-smugglers’ response to the latest change of policy. It is pure moral blackmail. Frontex and the Italian authorities can either take charge of the ship – or responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of people.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Inside the Ezadeen’s livestock hold, where the Syrian migrants travelled. Photograph: Alfonzo di Vincenzo/AFP/Getty

Admiral Giovanni Pettorino, the operational commander of the Italian coastguard, said this was “the third case we have recorded in this last few weeks of a ship abandoned to its fate with hundreds of people aboard”.

He said the traffickers used “merchant vessels at the end of their life – rust buckets bought for $100,000-$150,000 and then filled with hundreds of ‘migrants’, mostly Syrians, who pay up to $6,000 each for the crossing”. The Ezadeen would have brought in earnings of around $1.8m.

So, as the admiral said, the smugglers “have no compunction in abandoning the ship, given the profit margin”. He told news agency Adnkronos that, if a way were not found to deal with the traffickers’ latest wheeze, the leaving of ships adrift in the Mediterranean would create “a very serious problem for navigation”.

It has also created an excruciating conundrum for the Italian authorities. Early on Saturday, police had been given instructions to prevent journalists speaking to the new arrivals.

Unlike the Syrians on board the Blue Sky M, those who arrived in Corigliano were bundled on to coaches to be driven to centres in other parts of Italy. Local reception facilities, police said, were overflowing.