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by Antonella Alba

09 December 2020The shipwreck of Lampedusa, symbol of all the tragedies of immigration by sea, is dated October 3, 2013. The victims were 368, never so many in a day since we remember the journeys of hope in the Mediterranean.

Now for that night the sentences come to those responsible, to those who had to help but did not.



The court of Agrigento sentenced the commander of the fishing boat to six years in prison that that terrible night of October 3, 2013 would not have rescued hundreds of migrants on a boat that then sank causing the death of those 368 people, including many women and children. .

The entire crew was also sentenced to four years in prison.

Six people in all. 



The accusation hypothesized by the prosecutor of Agrigento, led by Luigi Patronaggio, is of failure to rescue.



The fishing boat Aristeus of Mazara del Vallo that was fishing in the waters in front of Lampedusa would have been the only boat that, according to the surveys of the satellite sea control system, was in those waters at the hour of the night when the shipwreck occurred.

The investigation was based on the statements of the 152 survivors who said from the beginning that one or two boats that night approached while they were adrift.

The men of the crew of that fishing boat questioned by the prosecutor Andrea Maggioni and by the chief prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio, have always denied any responsibility. 



Six years to Commander Matteo Gancitano, and four years each to his deputy Vittorio Cusumano and to the crew members, Alfonso Di Natale and four North Africans making up the crew.

Some survivors interviewed after the disaster by the Habeshia Agency had told of two ghost ships.

Here is the testimony:



"They were two large ships, light in color and the size of a patrol boat or a deep-sea fishing boat. They sailed in pairs a few hundred meters from us, towards the open sea. Our boat was now less than one kilometer from the shore. One of the two ships changed direction, making a full circle around our overloaded boat and then quickly resumed its course, catching up with the other that was moving away. Some of us, convinced that we had not seen us , they thought of signaling our presence by setting fire to a blanket soaked in diesel fuel. There was a huge blaze that started a fire. At that point, hundreds of people, frightened, instinctively rushed to the on the opposite side of the bridge. This is how the boat lost its trim: it capsized and went to the bottom ". 



As part of the investigation by the Court of Agrigento and the investigations coordinated by the prosecutor Luigi Patronaggio with the prosecutor Gloria Andreoli, the investigators also stopped a 35-year-old Tunisian Khaled Bensalem indicated as the smuggler of the 'death barge', already sentenced to eighteen years in prison for multiple murder and aiding and abetting, today he serves his sentence in the prison of Agrigento.

Today the sentence has also arrived for the others.