Judge mulls charges for migrant disaster ship skipper

The Tunisian captain of a migrant boat in which at least 700 people drowned was to learn Friday what charges he will face over the deadly disaster.

Mohammed Ali Malek, 27, appeared before a judge in the Sicilian city of Catania after being accused by prosecutors of causing the tragedy.

The 20-metre (66-foot) former fishing boat Malek was in charge of capsized and sank off Libya in the early hours of Sunday after a collision with a container ship that had answered a distress call.

Malek, who faces a potential indictment for culpable homicide and causing a shipwreck, stands accused of causing the collision through steering mistakes and of allowing the boat to put to sea with far too many people on board.

Prosecutors also want him to be charged with illegal confinement on the basis of testimony from survivors that hundreds of those on board were locked into either the hold or a lower deck.
The skipper is also alleged to have been drinking and smoking hashish whilst in charge of the boat.

Also in court on Friday was alleged crew member and Syrian national Mahmud Bikhit, 25.

Prosecutors have asked for him to be charged only with aiding and abetting illegal immigration and his lawyers were expected to argue that he had been a migrant enlisted to help crew the ship rather than a member of the people smuggling network responsible for organising the voyage.

The judge in the case approved an order to keep both men in custody pending further investigation but a hearing on what charges should be formally laid against them continued into the eventing.

- Reign of terror -

Malek and Bikhit were among only 28 survivors of what appears to have been the worst maritime disaster in the Mediterranean since World War II.

Based on their interviews with the migrants who escaped, prosecutors have estimated that there were at least 750 people on board the boat when it embarked from the Libyan coast close to the city of Tripoli.
Aid organisations and the captain of the King Jacob, the Portuguese container ship involved in the fatal collision, had earlier put the total at more than 800.

Only 24 bodies were recovered from the waters around the wreck. They were taken to Malta and buried there on Thursday without any of them having been identified.

The people on board were mostly young men from sub-Saharan Africa but there were also reported to be victims from the Middle East and South Asia, including an unknown number of women and children.

The survivors included 12 Malians, four Eritreans, three Bangladeshis, two nationals of Senegal and Somalia and one each from Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast and the Gambia.

Survivors have told prosecutors how the migrants who paid between $730 and $7000 for their place on the boat to Italy had been subjected to a reign of terror even before they were crammed on board.

Several migrants were beaten to death and others died of illness or exhaustion during a period of up to a month in which they were held in disused farm buildings near Tripoli awaiting embarkment.