emails and phone calls at dawn – breaking latest news

FROM OUR REPORTER
CROTONE – After a week, the last thing we know about the shipwreck of Cutro is a list of phone calls and an email asking for help. Conversations with partly mysterious contents and in any case all of them useless to avoid the massacre, because they arrived in the time slot that goes from 4.20 to 4.35 in the morning. Instead, the boat with 180 (and perhaps more) migrants crashed into the shoal between 4 and 4.10 on that unfortunate dawn of 26 February. While the line of lifeless bodies grew on the shoreline of Steccato di Cutro, someone called for help believing that it would still be possible to save everyone.

It’s 4.20. A Turkish number calls the Crotone carabinieri from an unidentified boat, as they say. The bad line, it falls. The phone was hooked up to the cell in Le Castella, Isola Capo Rizzuto. The military try to contact him again but all in vain. At 4.35, a foreign reporting agent with an Italian telephone number calls the Operations Center of the Port Authorities twice (Mrcc), in Rome: in the first call he says he sees a boat in trouble that is about to capsize, 40-50 meters from the shore in front of the mouth of the Tacina river. I hear them screaming, he adds. In the second call, immediately after, he announces: I saw the fishing boat capsize. 4.52 am. Another foreign whistleblower contacts the same operations center in Rome. Again the Turkish number; the guy speaks in english. There’s a boat about to sink off Isola Capo Rizzuto, he says. They ask him if he’s on board and he replies no, but I got the information via Facebook and I don’t have the board number. Does he know how many people are on board?, they ask him. Answer: From the post on the Internet, there are 200-250 people present, I don’t know what boat it is and I have no other information.

In the chronology of those excited minutes, the next call at 5.13. It comes from an Italian-Moroccan woman, a well-known human rights activist. She also calls the Coast Guard, who notes in her service report: she told us that she received a call from a German number (which she does not provide) from a self-styled family member of some people on board the boat. She says she learned that the boat had left Turkey with 120 people on board and that about an hour earlier she had hit a rock and broke off at Capo Rizzuto. The woman also told the harbor master’s office the longitude and latitude of the boat and said that there was a Turkish phone on board, whose number she provided. They ask her how she gets the exact location and that Turkish phone number; she replies that she was brought back to her by the relatives of the people on board, therefore by the German who called her.

At 5.35, they note in the Coast Guard, an email was received from the whistleblower confirming what was said in the phone call. Apart from the eyewitness who first heard the screams and then saw the boat capsize, the other calls bring questions and mystery. For example: what would be the facebook profile that would have published the post to say we are sinking? (4.52 call). Does it make sense to publish an Sos via Facebook while waiting for someone to pick it up in the sea of ​​the Web? Or: how can one of the migrants on board know the exact location? Especially since we now know, from testimonies, that the smugglers had the tools to obscure the migrants’ cell phones.

If anything, it is they, the smugglers, who have that kind of information. Was this German relative the relative of a smuggler? Among other things, there is no sense in being in difficulty and calling not for help but a relative in Germany who in turn then calls an activist in Italy… And finally: who is the mysterious person who calls at 4.20 and then disappears? Among the things now known, after a week of recovered bodies and political controversy, there are the key points that we have told in recent days to understand if and who made a mistake that night.

From those points the prosecutor Giuseppe Capoccia and his substitute Pasquale Festa will start in the investigation into the missing aid, which for now is only cognitive and for which the carabinieri of the provincial command of Crotone have had a delegation (yet not formalized in writing). Point number one: the sighting of the boat at 10.26pm on Saturday. The European Frontex agency sees it 40 miles off the Calabrian coast. Report it to the Italian contact point (essentially to the Finance) and for information to the Coast Guard. Point two: Finance goes out to look for the boat. It’s a maritime police operation, not a rescue one. At 2.20 a patrol boat leaves from Crotone, at 2.30 a patrol boat from Taranto. But the sea is forbidding, they say on the radio. And they go back to activate the ground search device along the landing lines, alerting the Coast Guard. Nobody launches the Sar activity, i.e. search and rescue at sea. Between 4 and 4.10 the crash. At 4.35 the call that certifies the end: I saw it roll over.