Catania's senior public prosecutor, Giovanni Salvi, speaking at a crowded and at times heated news conference in Catania yesterday, said that it was still too early to conclude just how many people had died in Saturday night's boat tragedy off the coast of Libya.
The fact that the number of victims oscillates between 700 and 900 is entirely dependent on the fact that the first two survivors interviewed by the judicial authorities offered different estimates of the number of people on the boat.
Mr Salvi, who is investigating the crimes of clandestine immigration and eventual manslaughter in relation to the tragedy, last night said no one should be much surprised that the two survivors apparently contradict one another. In the improvised context of these clandestine crossings, both men were guessing at the numbers involved.
What seems less uncertain, which is information supplied by both men, is that the fishing boat in question had two levels below deck.
Approximately 250 women and 50 children are believed to have been locked into the bottom level, while a majority of the men on board were locked into the first level.
It is believed that all of these people sank with the ship, having no possible escape route. As for the 28 survivors, they were up on deck when the boat overturned and were thus thrown into the sea.
Frightened passengers
Mr Salvi also said that his investigation must look into the possibility that the Portuguese merchant ship
King Jacob
, which was first on the scene, might have collided with the boat people vessel, thus causing it to capsize.
The two survivors and the captain of the King Jacob have said that this was not the case but that the boat overturned when the frightened passengers, many of whom had probably never been out at sea in their lives, rushed over to one side of the vessel when the King Jacob came on the scene.
Mr Salvi said that, based on the evidence of the survivors, there were people from Algeria, Egypt, Somalia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Senegal, Mali, Zambia, Bangladesh and Ghana on the boat.
The prosecutor also said that it seems likely that this boat actually began its journey in Egypt, then perhaps made a stop in Libya to pick up more passengers.
He also conceded that many of the mysteries of this particular tragedy may never be definitively resolved since it is unlikely that any attempt will be made to raise the boat from the sea floor, given that it sank in 400-metre-deep waters, 70 kilometres off the Libyan coast.
Mr Salvi seemed to play down the Mare Nostrum versus Triton polemic about the relative inefficiency of the current Mediterranean patrols carried out by the EU’s Frontex border control. He said that, even if Mare Nostrum – the Italian-run search-and-rescue service disbanded last year – had still been operating, it was by no means clear that it would have been able to avoid this most recent tragedy.
Much Italian media attention concentrated on the decision to take the 24 bodies so far recovered to Malta before then heading on to Catania late last night with 27 of the 28 survivors.
Fundamental problem
Mr Salvi could offer no convincing explanation for this decision leaving the media to speculate that no one in the Italian government had much cared for the “photo-op” of yet another row of bodies on the quayside.
Speaking earlier in the day, however, Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi had suggested that one of the fundamental problems underlying the current Mediterranean boat people crisis was the absence of a coherent "Plan B" for the post-Gadafy era in Libya.
Speaking to the RTL radio, Mr Renzi said: “The international community didn’t really ask itself what would happen after [the fall of] Gadafy. Libya has been torn apart and now we need a precise strategy . . . ”
Speaking ahead of a summit of EU foreign and interior ministers yesterday in Luxemburg, the prime minister said that Italy was asking its European partners to consider the Libyan crisis “in a more serious manner than in the past”.
Saying that the EU could and should arrive at a unanimously agreed position on Libya, Mr Renzi did, however, rule out any question of a military intervention in the country, calling such a move an “absolutely excessive risk at this moment” .