Mediterranean boat capsize: Captain, crew member charged

The captain of the boat that capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa last week killing hundreds of migrants has been charged along with a member of the crew, media reported on Tuesday citing Italian officials.

The 27-year-old Tunisian captain Mohammed Ali Malek was charged with reckless multiple homicide, and along with Mahmud Bikhit, a 25-year-old Syrian member of the crew, was also charged with favouring illegal immigration, BBC reported.

The two were among the 27 survivors who arrived in the Italian island of Sicily late on Monday.

According to the authorities, the accident was a result of the mistakes made by the captain and also because of the ship being overcrowded.

Prosecutors in the Sicilian port of Catania said the boat collided with a Portuguese container ship just before it capsized, but absolved the merchant vessel's crew of any responsibility.

They said the boat had keeled over after the collision, which had been caused by steering mistakes by the captain and the panicked movements of the migrants on the 20-metre boat.

Carlotta Sami of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Italy was in Catania to meet the survivors. About 800 people were believed to have died in the accident, she said.

There were nationals of Syria, Eritrea, Somalia, Mali, Sierra Leone and Senegal on board, according to the report.

"They left on Saturday morning around eight o'clock in the morning from Tripoli (in Libya), and they started to have problems, and they were approached by merchant vessels during the night around 10 o'clock."

At some point, "the little boat lost its balance, and people started to move around. Those that were down wanted to come up and vice versa, and many people fell into the water, and then the boat capsized," Sami said.

The two men were charged after the European Union (EU) set out a package of measures to ease the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

Search-and-rescue operations would be stepped up, and there would be a campaign to destroy traffickers' boats, the report said. A homicide investigation has been opened into the disaster.

The European Commission announced on Tuesday that it supported launching a military operation to capture vessels used by human traffickers in the Mediterranean Sea, similar to the counter-piracy operation carried out in the Indian Ocean, Spanish news agency Efe reported.

Separately, two of those rescued from a vessel that ran aground off the Greek island of Rhodes on Monday would be taken to the prosecutor's office, BBC said.

It is believed that the two men, both Syrians, were in charge of the boat. They will face charges linked to illegally transporting people to Greece, and for being responsible for the deaths of three passengers.