Italian investigator denounces Tunisian smugglers after 41 migrants feared dead

An Italian prosecutor investigating a capsizing that left 41 migrants feared dead in the Mediterranean Sea denounced Tunisia-based smugglers who launch boats so badly built that they quickly take on water, overturn or break apart.

The capsizing this week was the latest in a string of similar tragedies that have killed dozens of people who entrusted their lives to smugglers based on Tunisia’s shores to reach Italy in hopes of finding a better life.

Four migrants who were rescued by a passing merchant ship following the capsizing on August 4 told doctors and police that they survived by clinging to air tubes for hours.

A group of survivors from the capsized boat spotted an empty vessel and struggled to reach it, with only four people able to climb aboard.

Once inside the vessel, the survivors discovered that the iron-hulled, open-topped vessel had no engine.

State TV reported that the migrants survived for four days on four bottles of drinking water and half a packet of crackers that they found inside the boat.

A Malta-flagged ship rescued them and an Italian Coast Guard vessel took them to Lampedusa, a small Italian island in the Mediterranean Sea.

The survivors said 41 other passengers, including three children, all set out from the port of Sfax, Tunisia, on August 3.

They said waves as high as four meters (13 feet) swamped the smugglers’ boats the next day.

The others migrants were missing and presumably dead.

Chief prosecutor Salvatore Vella, based in Agrigento, Sicily said: “Their story is plausible. We know that the smugglers launch these boats of very poor quality with 50 to 70 migrants aboard.”

Sometimes survivors of such shipwrecks include crewmen engaged by the smugglers who then try to pass themselves off as passengers, but in this case, “we can exclude any of the four” had such a role, Mr Vella told The Associated Press.

The boat the survivors set off in is the type hastily soldered together with pieces of iron by smugglers in Tunisia to keep up with demands by migrants desperate to make the risky journey toward Italy’s shores, Mr Vella said.

“The soldering on these boats is done only at some points, not in a solid line (so) water gets in,″ he added. “They are criminals.”

The fate of who those who might have been on board the empty vessel is not known — though it’s not uncommon for smugglers to tow or transfer people between boats in the Mediterranean.

“Often boats are left behind after migrants go aboard a rescue vessel,” Mr Vella said. “We don’t know why there was no engine aboard the boat” found by the survivors, but “these engines are precious, so it’s possible someone took it” at sea.

Pope Francis, who since the start of his papacy has repeatedly denounced the loss of life of migrants at sea, said on Twitter: “Let us not remain indifferent to these tragedies.”

According to an official of the European Union’s border agency, Frontex, a fishing boat was recently seen harassing migrants at sea off Tunisia’s coast, circling around them and asking them for money in exchange for towing them to closer to Lampedusa.

Italian Premier Giorgia Meloni, whose right-wing government includes an anti-migrant party, had enlisted the European Union’s help to forge an accord with Tunisia in a bid to stop the migrant boats in exchange for economic and other aid.

But the number of migrants reaching Italy so far this year is more than double compared to the same period in 2022, with no sign of slowing. Some 1,000 set foot on Lampedusa in the 24 hours ending Thursday morning alone.

On Monday, the charity rescue ship Geo Barents took aboard 49 migrants, including 32 unaccompanied minors, from a smugglers’ vessel that had been adrift for days, said Doctors Without Borders, which assists on the ship.

“Imagine them six days adrift without food and only salty seawater to drink,” Doctors Without Borders tweeted on Thursday.

Survivors told their rescuers one child disappeared in the sea.

As of Thursday, nearly 94,800 migrants have arrived by sea this year in Italy, either after being rescued by the Italian Coast Guard, by private charity ships or by making it unaided, according to Interior Ministry figures.

On Wednesday, Libyan authorities said at least 27 African migrants have died in the country’s western desert near the border with Tunisia.

Later, Tunisia and Libya agreed to take 276 sub-Saharan migrants stranded in the desert near the border post of Ras Jedir to shelters, Tunisian Interior Ministry spokesman Faker Bouzghaya told the AP on Thursday.

“We took charge of a group that was sheltered by the Tunisian Red Crescent and the Libyan side did the same so that the migrants were evacuated from the zone,” he said, adding that Tunisia took in 126 migrants.

The number Libya agreed to take was not immediately available.