Italian navy should have effected immediate rescue, says former AFM commander

Italian boats "should have acted immediately" to save lives at sea when it received a distress call from a sinking boat on 11 October, former AFM commander Martin Xuereb told The Malta Independent on the Lampedusa shipwreck that claimed the lives of 270 lives at sea.

200 were saved in the rescue mission subsequently coordinated by Malta.

Xuereb said that while Malta was responsible for coordinating the rescue operation, Italian ships that were in the vicinity should not have waited for instructions from Malta but acted immediately to save lives. According to the newspaper, "Xuereb insists the logical thing to do would have been to save the migrants and worry about the details late" and that the Italians did not intervene, as happened in previous cases, to effect a rescue in Malta's SAR zone.

The Italian navy ignored rescue calls from the sinking fishing boat that claimed the lives of over 260 Syrian and other nationals 11 October at sea, to "pass the buck" to Malta - according to Italy's investigative journalism magazine l'Espresso.

Journalist Fabrizio Gatti published documentary evidence that Italy's Libra patrol boat was a short distance away from the boat that was carrying over 460 migrants. "The sinking fishing-boat was certainly visible on their radar screen, being such a short distance away," Gatti wrote of the 12:26pm rescue call received by the Italians on Friday, 11 October.

According to the evidence published by L'Espresso, the cause of the delay in succouring the migrants was the "passing the buck of responsibility between Italy and Malta during search-and-rescue operations". Apart from data from some 13,000 ship movements in transit from 11am to midnight during that Friday of 11 October, there is an eyewitness report by Admiral Felicio Angrisano, commander of Italy's coastguard, and other reports by naval officers.

L'Espresso says that at 1pm on 11 October, instead of steaming ahead to the point of disaster - 113km south of Lampedusa and 218km from Malta - the Italian operations centre ignored a direct intervention and passed on the rescue call to the Maltese armed forces.

According to the Italian Navy, at 1:34pm the Libra was only 27 miles away from the rescue point, or 50km. At the ship's top speed of 20 knots (37km/h) the Libra could have made it in 90 minutes, by 3pm.

But it only got there at 6pm, because it was only after the children's boat sank that the Maltese coordinators demanded assistance from the Rome operations centre. At 4:22pm, the Maltese armed forces told Rome that one of their aircrafts had identified the fishing-boat adrift. At 5:07pm, they informed Rome that the boat had capsized and ask Italy for help. The first rescue boat, the Maltese P61 patrol boat, reached the site only at 5:51pm, and then only joined by the Libra at 6pm.