In Locri, Calabria, a man was stopped who survived last week’s shipwreck off the Ionian coast, in which it is estimated that more than 50 migrants who left Turkey days earlier died. The man is under investigation by the Locri prosecutor’s office on charges of having killed, after raping her, a 16-year-old girl who was on the ship. He is Iraqi and was taken from the hospital where he was hospitalized and taken to the Catanzaro prison, where he is now in precautionary custody. The charges against him are based on the story of the mother of the murdered girl, who also survived the shipwreck. The woman would have recognized him and reported it to the local authorities.
The story was told by Republic and by the news agency AGI, as well as by some local newspapers, which talked about the man’s arrest but without mentioning the rape accusations: according to these reconstructions he is accused of murder for killing the girl by suffocating her. The arrest was validated by the judge for preliminary investigations of Locri.
At the moment there are not many other details: the man is known only by his initials, HA, and is known to be 27 years old. He is one of the 11 survivors of the shipwreck, which occurred between Sunday 16 June and Monday 17 June in the Ionian Sea, approximately 185 kilometers from the coast of Calabria. He and the other people on board had been rescued by a merchant ship and then transferred to a Coast Guard boat, which took them to Roccella Ionica, in the province of Reggio Calabria. It is estimated that there were around sixty people on board that vessel, and 36 bodies have so far been recovered.
