Italian inquiry: No tie between rescuers, smugglers

ROME — A prosecutor based in Sicily told Italian senators Tuesday that his office has found no links or contacts between migrant smugglers and humanitarian organizations operating rescue boats in the Mediterranean.

Last month, another Sicilian prosecutor raised alarm by saying in interviews that he has evidence that some organizations, established specifically to rescue migrants from foundering smugglers’ boats, could be in collusion with human traffickers based in Libya, from where the vessels are launched.

Rightist political parties, notably the anti-migrant Northern League, seized on the Catania prosecutor’s comments to support their contentions that the transferring of hundreds of thousands of migrants rescued at sea to the safety of Italian ports over the past few years essentially facilitates the human traffickers’ lucrative business.

Syracuse prosecutor Francesco Paolo Giordano told the Senate defense commission Tuesday that his investigations found no indication of links.

“As far as our office goes, nothing has emerged in terms of presumed indirect or compromising links between [nongovernmental organizations], or elements of them, and the smugglers of migrants,” the prosecutor said.

Giordano volunteered that some organizations have shown less-than-cooperative attitudes toward judicial authorities. “We interpret that not as aiding and abetting smugglers but rather attribute that to an ideological attitude,” the prosecutor said. The organizations are expressing “humanitarian coherence, in favor of migrants, not in favor of police” who investigate the trafficking.

Catania prosecutor Carmelo Zuccaro, in interviews, has said there are indications that some rescue boats turn off transponders so their movements can’t be traced and then enter Libyan territorial waters to pluck migrants from overcrowded, unseaworthy smugglers’ boats.

Doctors Without Borders officials told the senators later Tuesday that their rescue craft have entered Libyan waters only five times, and always under exceptional circumstances and after first clearing it with the Italian coast guard, which coordinates all migrant rescues, and after receiving an OK from Libyan maritime authorities, too.

Zuccaro has said his probe doesn’t involve Doctors Without Borders or Save the Children but instead is scrutinizing the operations and financing of several newcomers, including from Malta, Germany and Spain.