Frontex, alarms and the Guardia di Finanza. Now the Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the failure to provide assistance – Corriere.it

The decision was made yesterday morning. On Sunday’s shipwreck off the Calabrian coast of Steccato di Cutro, the only investigation concerning the activity of the smugglers and the crash on the shoal is no longer open. There is a second file. The confirmation comes in the middle of the day, immediately after President Sergio Mattarella’s visit to the survivors in the hospital and in front of the coffins lined up in the Palasport. The prosecutor wants to understand if and what crimes were committed in organizing the intervention at sea after the sighting of the boat. Or rather: he wants to know if crimes have been committed by not starting any rescue operation, until it was too late. And to ascertain all this, the prosecutor Giuseppe Capoccia delegated the carabinieri of the Crotone Company.

They will be the ones to put together the correspondence of the Guardia operations centres Costiera and Guardia di Finanza, to acquire the audio recordings, the information received and given via radio, the report of the telephone calls made from the boat and from the fishermen on shore… The activities and dispatches of the Frontex aircraft which On Saturday evening he flew over the Ionian Sea, first seeing the boat of migrants arriving from Turkey and reporting it to the national contact point (essentially to the Finance Police) and – for information – also to the Coast Guard.

The rules of the Sar Plan, i.e. sea rescue, will be evaluated one by one. AND in the end it will be the prosecutor who will establish whether and who made a mistake. Crimes at the moment are not hypothesized precisely because of the new information file, even if the most probable (in the event that criminal liability arises) are wrongful death and culpable disaster. Both the Coast Guard and the Guardia di Finanza already have their reports ready for the prosecution. The game is played on the danger situation for the people on board the boat. No one – neither Frontex, nor the Guardia di Finanza nor the Coast Guard – perceived or declared in communications with each other that the migrants on that boat were risking their lives.

Apart from the fact that his thermal instruments had detected the presence of many people on board and the use of the Turkish telephone of a probable smuggler, Frontex (European Border and Coast Guard Agency) has sent its dispatch speaking of units that sail regularly, at 6 knots, in good buoyancy conditions, with only one person visible on deck. Called to give explanations, the Agency then let it be known that, in essence, she reports but then it’s up to the competent Italian authorities to take the next steps. Will it be enough to keep yourself out of any liability?

But if the role of Frontex is secondary, the same certainly cannot be said of the Guard Costiera and the Guardia di Finanza. The prosecutor asked the carabinieri to retrace every step of their activity between 11.03 pm, when Frontex spots the boat, and 4-4.10 am, when that sea cart and its human cargo end up against the shoal, in front of Steccato di Cutro. Even if never formally evoked by the parties involved or by politics, it was now clear that a second inquiry into the lack of aid would be necessary. The clashes on the chain of interventions / non-interventions at sea that night could not fail to reach the prosecutor’s office. And the prosecutor himself – who at first seemed to exclude an investigation into the matter – in the end could not ignore the wave of post-shipwreck emotions and controversies. But above all, he could not ignore the suspicion that the Coast Guard and the Guardia di Finanza may be responsible for the failure to raise the alarm and, therefore, the failure to provide assistance.

When they have put together all the documentation, the carabinieri of the Compagnia di Crotone will write a report and deliver the file to the prosecutor’s office. The delegation for the new investigation should only concern the acquisition of documents. Among the documents are the reconstructions, put in black and white, by Finance and the Coast Guard. At the moment, that of the Coast Guard is more detailed, which starts from 11.03 pm on Saturday 25, with the note from Frontex which reaches the International coordination centre, and articulates every communication from the operations center until 8.26 am on Sunday, when daylight illuminated the drama of the dead migrants covered in white sheets on the beach of Cutro.

The Guardia di Finanza reconstructs the facts from 10.26 pm on Saturday, the exact minute in which Frontex sighted the boat, until 5.30, when the soldiers arrived on site and found the shipwreck, proceeded to rescue the survivors and recover the bodies.