As he bites nervously on his nails, the captain accused of leading
900 migrants to their death watches as body bags are taken from his
ship.
Tunisian Mohammed Ali Malek
allegedly stowed hundreds of desperate men, women and children fleeing
war and poverty in the Middle East and Africa, aboard his vessel before
sailing from Libya to Europe.
The migrants are understood to have paid as much £2,000 each to board with the promise of gaining asylum in Italy.
None
of them could have foreseen the horrors that awaited them when Malek
allegedly made the fatal error of ramming a merchant ship that had come
to his aid after seeing his vessel in difficulty.
His hasty
action forced hundreds of the panic stricken migrants to rush to one
side of the boat, causing it to capsize and drown all but a handful of
its human cargo.
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Malek has been charged with multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and aiding illegal immigration.
His Syrian crew member, Mahmud Bikhit has also been charged with aiding illegal immigration.
The
few survivors were brought to a migrant holding centre in Catania, in
Sicily and were “very tired, very shocked,” according to Flavio Di
Giacomo of the International Organisation for Migration.
They told how women and children died “like rats in a cage” after being locked into the boat’s hold by traffickers in Libya.
Some clung to floating corpses until Italian and Maltese coastguards came to rescue them in the dead of the night.
The tragedy, the third in a week resulting in more than 1,300 deaths, has sent shockwaves of revulsion around the world.
Reuters
Looks on: Mohammed Ali Malek and Mahmud Bikhit
And a leading charity warned 2,500 children could die in the
Mediterranean this year unless politicians restart search and rescue
operations off the Italian coast.
Save the Children is calling on European Union leaders meeting in Brussels to agree to the move.
The
charity’s boss Justin Forsyth said “EU leaders hold the lives of
thousands of desperate people in their hands when they meet tomorrow.
“With
every day that they prevaricate and delay restarting search and rescue
operations, the risk grows that more people will die as they try to
reach Europe.
“We cannot allow 2015 to be the deadliest year in the Mediterranean yet.”
Save
the Children staff in Italy said most of the victims of Sunday’s
tragedy were young men but there were also several children aged between
10 and 12.
Gemma Parkin said: ‘We have not yet been able to ask them but
it seems certain that many of them will have had friends and family who
were lost in the wreck.”
The coastguard revealed it saved nearly 640 in six different rescue operations on Monday alone.
A further 446 were rescued from a leaking migrant ship about 80 miles south of the Calabrian coast.
Italian officials believe there could be up to one million people trying to escape to Europe from conflict-torn Libya.
A leading smuggler dismissed EU plans.
Giving his name as Hajj, he said: “Last year the same thing happened when these tragedies occurred.
"Human
rights people came out and started talking, and politicians met and
said they’d take action. But nothing happened. It’ll be the same thing.”
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