Italy prosecutors accuse six over 2023 migrant shipwreck

ROME: Italian prosecutors investigating a deadly shipwreck which killed 94 migrants in 2023 accused two members of the coast guard and four police officers Tuesday of involuntary manslaughter.
Prosecutors in Crotone, a city near the shipwreck off southern Italy, must now ask a judge to rule whether the six stand trial for the tragedy.
The victims, including many children, perished when their overcrowded boat sank in stormy dawn weather just off the region of Calabria.
The disaster sparked outrage amid allegations authorities did not react quickly enough to reports of an overloaded vessel in the area.
Critics of far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the government’s policy of treating migrant boats as a law enforcement issue, rather than a humanitarian one, may have fatally delayed the rescue.
European Union border agency Frontex flagged the vessel to the Italians late in the evening as the weather worsened.
The four financial police officers stand accused of failing to communicate key information to the coast guard, because they did not mention the difficulties they were having in sailing due to the difficult sea conditions, prosecutors said in a statement Tuesday.
The two members of the coast guard are accused of “not having acquired the necessary information to have a precise idea” of what the financial police were up to and of having therefore made “an erroneous assessment” of the situation.
The prosecutors said coast guard vessels, designed for rough seas, could have intervened.
The coast guard is supposed to rescue all vessels carrying migrants, as boats run by human traffickers are inevitably dangerously overcrowded and ill-equipped.
There was “obvious negligence in the application of the rules imposed by European and national laws in this type of situation,” the prosecutors said.