PROVIDED BY CNNNEXT.COM
Published on Apr 22, 2015
"When the Italian Coast Guard first got a call Saturday night from a fishing boat alerting it to a large vessel carrying migrants in the Mediterranean between the Libyan coast and the Italian island of Lampedusa, it radioed the nearest commercial ship, a Portuguese freighter called the King Jacob, to go help.
What happened when the King Jacob, nearly 500 feet long, approached the multitiered migrant vessel early on Sunday morning is not precisely clear.
But an account provided Tuesday by prosecutors in Sicily, based on interviews with survivors, said the captain of the migrant ship, seeing the approaching King Jacob, made “wrong maneuvers” and collided with it.
The migrants then crowded to one side of their boat after the collision, causing it to capsize.
Investigators are just beginning to debrief the few survivors of the wreck: 28 men out of the estimated 850 people who packed onto the migrant vessel.
But they have arrested its captain, identified on Tuesday by prosecutors as Mohammed Ali Malek, 27, a Tunisian, on suspicion of multiple homicide."
