The criminal trial of a man accused of being the captain of a migrant ship that capsized last year, killing up to 800 people, is due to begin today in the Sicilian city of Catania, in what officials say is an attempt to pursue justice for victims of one of the worst maritime tragedies in the Mediterranean in decades.
A Tunisian named Mohammed Ali Malek, who was 27 years-old at the time of his arrest, was among just 28 survivors who were rescued after the overloaded fishing boat, which he allegedly commanded, capsized shortly before midnight on 18 April 2015. Although the precise number of victims is unknown, it is believed that more than 700 people – mostly African and Bangladeshi migrants who were locked in the ship’s hull – were killed.
Malek is accused of causing a collision with a Portuguese merchant ship, the King Jacob, that was approaching the fishing boat in an attempt to make a rescue.
The trial, to begin on Tuesday, is the most high-profile case involving illegal human trafficking to reach the courts since hundreds of thousands of Middle Eastern and African refugees and migrants began making the treacherous journey across the Mediterranean to seek safety in Europe. Malek is expected to be confronted with survivors of the shipwreck during the trial.
The capsizing of the trawler off the coast of Libya sparked public outcry and forced EU leaders to hold emergency meetings to come up with a plan to try to prevent such mass casualties at sea, It also led to the restoration of EU-wide search and rescue missions off the coast of Italy.
Giovanni Salvi, a former prosecutor in Catania who initially pursued the case and is now in Rome, said the trial was important because it meant someone would be held accountable for the death of hundreds of people.
Salvi said the case was also significant because the survivors were treated as witnesses to a crime and not as criminals who had entered Italy illegally. He said the case affirmed Italy’s jurisdiction over an incident that occurred in the high seas even though it was technically outside Italy’s territorial waters.
Carmelo Zuccaro, the current prosector in the case, did not return a request for comment.
A lawyer for Malek suggested the Tunisian’s defence would rely heavily on questions about the exact sequence of events that led up to the wreck, and not whether he was the captain of the vessel or not. “It is certainly a difficult trial,” said Massimo Ferrante.
“Perhaps many people expect an example to be made of him as punishment. I only expect that the truth should emerge, at least on a judicial level,” he said.
Ferrante said only one thing was clear: that the black box, a device that should have been made available the King Jacob to assist in piecing together the final moments before the crash, had not been made available to the court. “When the investigators went to take it, they found that everything was erased. This is a fact, not a fantasy of the defence,” he said.
Last year, when asked about his client, Ferrante suggested that Malek was a scapegoat and had been accused of commanding the vessel by other survivors simply because he had pale skin.
According to survivors who were interviewed by the Guardian in May last year, passengers aboard the vessel had been separated into eight or nine groups of 100 and taken by gun-toting smugglers to board small dinghies that then brought them to the larger steel-hulled ship, which was moored a mile or so out at sea. The survivors recounted that the loading of the ship took hours, with each migrant being directed to stand in a specific spot. Most of the smugglers who were on board then disembarked, allegedly leaving Malek in charge to steer the ship.
Details of the crash itself are murky, but the migrant boat did seem to speed up as it approached the King Jacob, leading the vessels to collide, after which the migrant boat capsized.
Malek’s brother, Makrem Mahjoub, told Reuters last year that the defendant’s real name was Nourredine Mahjoub and that he had spent years in Italy and France before being deported and returning to Libya, where he sought work. The defendant’s brother alleged that Malek was forced, under the threat of smugglers armed with Kalashnikovs, to pilot the voyage because of his experience as a fisherman. Reuters said the account could not be independently verified.(Stephanie Kirchgaessner)
Link: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/12/man-accused-of-being-captain-of-capsized-migrant-ship-on-trial-in-italy
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