Italian police have arrested a
man accused of steering a boat packed with about 500 desperate
migrants that capsized last week, killing an estimated 350
people, investigators said Monday.
News of the arrest came on the heels of an even worse
disaster - a shipwreck off the coast of Libya that caused the
deaths of up to 900 people on Sunday.
A 20-year-old Senegalese man named Da Mbao was located by
police on Friday in a Trapani Center for Identification and
Expulsion (CIE) and has been charged with promoting illegal
immigration.
Mbao was identified based on the testimony of a survivors
of the April 12 disaster, who said one of two pilots was missing
a leg.
The wooden boat, about 20 metres long, left from the Libyan
coastal city of Zwarah with roughly 500 migrants on board,
police said.
It sank about 80 miles off the coast when passengers shifted
en masse to one side in a bid to attract the attention of a
merchant vessel.
Soldiers on the Bersagliere ship managed to save 150 of
them.
Eight corpses were recovered in a subsequent mission to
recover bodies from the area of the shipwreck.
Two of the migrants who survived kept themselves afloat by
gripping the bodies of some of the feared 900 dead,
investigators said Monday. They were saved after rescuers heard
their cries, they said.
On Monday, police uncovered an alleged international
migrant trafficking ring and arrested, among others, Ermias
Ghermay and Medhane Yehdego Redae, considered by authorities to
be "key human traffickers operating on the so-called Libyan
route".
Investigators said the ring of Eritreans, Ethiopians,
Ghanaians and Ivory Coast nationals made "enormous profits" by
smuggling thousands of their fellow citizens into Italy.
Ghermay, an Ethiopian citizen, had been a fugitive from
justice since July 2014, and investigators believe he was the
organizer responsible for an October 2013 shipwreck in which at
least 366 died at sea off the coast of the island of Lampedusa.
The criminal organization operated out of the provinces of
Agrigento, Catania, Palermo and Milan in cooperation with groups
in Africa and the Maghreb.
The ring helped migrants escape from shelters, establish
illegal residence in Italy, and then further their journey
onward to northern European countries such as Germany, Norway,
and Sweden, investigators said.
The investigation revealed the organization allegedly
transacted business totalling hundreds of thousands of euros
through illegal channels.
As Italian authorities crack down on human traffickers,
Italian Coast Guard vessel Bruno Gregoretti arrived at the port
of Valletta on Monday morning, carrying 24 bodies and 27 out of
the 28 survivors of a shipwreck off the Libyan coast believed to
have caused as many as 900 deaths.
Right after the remains of victims were taken ashore where
survivors underwent a medical checkup, the Gregoretti was
scheduled to leave for the Sicilian city of Catania, where one
of the migrants who survived, a Bangladeshi national, was taken
by helicopter.
He told authorities that some 950 migrants were on the boat
that capsized.
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