Manslaughter charges are being considered for the man who captained a boat that sank off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa last week, prosecutors said Tuesday, as the death toll hits 236.
Officials in Agrigento, Sicily, said 35-year-old ship captain Kaled Bensalam, of Tunisia, had been detained and investigated for multiple counts of voluntary manslaughter and causing the October 3 shipwreck.
Bensalam is also suspected of having organised another boat trip on April 11, when 250 migrants arrived in Lampedusa.
A team of 40 scuba divers was still searching at a depth of around 50 metres to recover bodies near the southern Italian island.
"We have to operate delicately, recovering the corpses one by one," Italy Coast Guard official Gianni Dessi told the SkyTG24 news channel. He said there was "no exact estimate" on the total number of victims.
Meanwhile, the other 154 survivors, all from Eritrea, staged a protest against poor conditions at the overcrowded migrant reception centre on the tiny island.
Prosecutors say that each migrant paid between 1,600 and 2,000 dollars to get on board, which would mean human traffickers who organized the trip are estimated to have earned up to 1 million dollars.
European Union interior ministers were due to discuss their response to the Lampedusa tragedy later Tuesday.
The talks in Luxembourg were expected to concentrate on Italy's request for more help from the bloc. Rome has called for: stepped up patrols on the Mediterranean; greater burden-sharing of asylum-seekers; and cooperation deals with North African nations.
EU Home Affairs Commissioner Cecilia Maelstrom said she would ask the ministers to give their political and financial support to "a big safe-and-rescue operation in the Mediterranean Sea" that would be launched by the EU border protection agency Front ex.
She also called on the bloc's member states "to do their utmost ... to share the responsibility" when it comes to asylum-seekers in Europe, noting that "today there are six, seven countries who take all the responsibility."
Germany, France and Sweden recorded the most asylum applicants in 2012 - with figures ranging from 43,865 for Sweden to 77,540 for Germany - according to the EU statistics agency Euro stat. At the other end, Estonia recorded just 75 applicants.
But there is little appetite in the bloc for dramatic asylum reforms, with Germany among those speaking out Tuesday against a change to the so-called Dublin rules, which force asylum-seekers to apply for protection in the first country of arrival.
German Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich rejected claims that Italy is "overloaded," noting that it has about 260 refugees per 1 million inhabitants, while Germany has 946.
But migrants are continuing to land on Italy's shores almost daily. Nearly 400 people, claiming to be from Syria and the Palestinian Territories, were rescued overnight by two cargo ships off the coast of south-eastern Sicily.
According to official figures, 30,100 would-be asylum-seekers arrived in Italy from January to September, compared to less than 8,000 during all of 2012. The inflow intensified during the past two months, especially from Syria, Somalia and Eritrea.
Each year, thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East and elsewhere try to reach Europe via Italy and Malta, in search of a better life. Many of them end up in Lampedusa, which is roughly halfway between Sicily and Tunisia.
Share
