Carabinieri searched the offices of the EU border control agency Frontex and the Italian Coast Guard in Rome on Thursday. Background was the shipwreck in Cutro off the coast of the southern Italian region of Calabria on February 26, in which 94 migrants died. Now there are alleged room delays that could have cost people their lives.
Frontex stated that there was no immediate threat from the radar system on the day of the shipwreck. The Coast Guard said they would of course have conducted a rescue operation in the heavy seas had they been alerted.
Both Frontex and the Italian Coast Guard have been accused of acting too late in rescuing the migrants, but the government under Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has firmly denied this.
Search for bodies stopped
After the deadly shipwreck off Cutro on February 26, Italian authorities stopped searching for bodies this week. The wooden boat left western Turkey with about 180 people on board, but crashed in stormy weather off the coast of Calabria in southern Italy.
80 people survived the accident. Six people are still missing. The provincial state office in the nearby town of Crotone said it had closed a search coordination center but would reactivate the unit if more bodies were sighted.
48 of the recovered bodies were flown to Afghanistan for burial. Other bodies were shipped to Tunisia, Iran, Palestine and Pakistan, while some were buried in Finland, Germany and Italy.
Four tugboats are said to be responsible for the disaster
Four smugglers are held responsible for the disaster, including a 28-year-old Turk who was arrested in Graz in early March on the basis of a European arrest warrant. He has since been handed over to the Italian police and is being held in a prison in Crotone. Crotone prosecutors are investigating him and three other alleged smugglers for manslaughter, negligent bodily harm and complicity in illegal immigration.
Source: Krone
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