Coastguard members, police officers accused of manslaughter over “voyage of death” that killed 94 migrants off Italy’s coast

Italian prosecutors investigating a shipwreck which killed 94 migrants in 2023 accused two members of the coastguard and four police officers Tuesday of involuntary manslaughter. Italy’s customs police previously said that crossing organizers charged 8,000 euros each for the “voyage of death.”

Prosecutors in Crotone, a city near the shipwreck off southern Italy, must now ask a judge to rule whether the six stand trial for the tragedy.

The victims, including many children, died when their overcrowded boat sank in stormy weather in the early hours of a February morning just off the region of Calabria.

The disaster sparked outrage amid allegations authorities did not react quickly enough to reports of an overloaded vessel in the area. Aid groups at the scene said many of the passengers hailed from Afghanistan, including entire families, as well as from Pakistan, Syria and Iraq.

Critics of far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said the government’s policy of treating migrant boats as a law enforcement issue, rather than a humanitarian one, may have fatally delayed the rescue.

European Union border agency Frontex flagged the vessel to the Italians late in the evening as the weather worsened.

The four financial police officers stand accused of failing to communicate key information to the coastguard, because they did not mention the sailing difficulties they were having due to the rough sea conditions, prosecutors said in a statement Tuesday.

The two members of the coastguard are accused of “not having acquired the necessary information to have a precise idea” of what the financial police were up to and of having therefore made “an erroneous assessment” of the situation.

The prosecutors said coastguard vessels, designed for rough seas, could have intervened.

The coastguard is supposed to rescue all vessels carrying migrants, as boats run by human traffickers are inevitably dangerously overcrowded and ill-equipped.

There was “obvious negligence in the application of the rules imposed by European and national laws in this type of situation,” the prosecutors said.

Economy Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti, who oversees the financial police, said on Instagram he “strongly defend(s)” both the financial police and the coastguard, and he was “certain that they have always acted exclusively for the public good.”

More than a dozen of those killed were said to be children — which hit the first responders particularly hard.

“It was a spine-chilling scene,” Firefighter Inspector Giuseppe Larosa said after the disaster, according to The Associated Press. “Many bodies disseminated on the beach. Among them many children… The thing that struck me the most was their silence. The terror in their eyes and the fact that they were mute. Silent.” 

Around 105,000 migrants came to Italy in 2022, roughly 38,000 more than the previous year. The country is a regular destination for migrants trying to reach Europe, and it has often pushed other countries in the region to do more.

IOM, the U.N. migration agency, has recorded more than 30,000 deaths and disappearances in the central Mediterranean since 2014.