Cutro Massacre: Six Finance Police and Coast Guard officers who failed to rescue the migrant boat will be tried.

Two and a half years after the caique “Summer Love” sank on the shoal off the beach at Cutro , Calabria, on the night of February 25th, the investigating judge of the Crotone court has accepted the requests of the prosecutor Pasquale Festa and sent to trial six officers and non-commissioned officers of the Coast Guard and the Coast Guard who decided not to intervene at that time.

Thus, in the body of water in front of Cutro , almost 100 people died , mostly families with children who had left Turkey, one of the most serious massacres in the Mediterranean.

The central thrust of the Crotone Prosecutor's Office's investigation is that the migrant massacre (98 confirmed deaths, including 35 children, but the number of missing remains unknown) could have been avoided . Thousands of pages of the investigation, made up of expert reports, images, videos, and chats, prove this.

The six defendants are facing various charges of shipwreck and manslaughter . Their culpability? Abandoning the vessel in the Ionian Sea, which was battered by force-4 seas and gale-force-7 winds, according to the expert report requested by the Prosecutor's Office. These conditions required urgent intervention to rescue the gulet, which had already been spotted on the evening of Friday, February 24, by a plane from the European agency Frontex .

According to the prosecutors' indictment, "having encountered difficulties navigating its patrol vessels," the Finance Police "returned both the Barbarisi patrol boat and the 5006 patrol boat to port without notifying the Coast Guard, falsely declaring that they were waiting for the vessel two or three miles offshore and refusing to send out vessels more suited to those weather conditions." As for the Coast Guard officers, "they remained inactive throughout the night," failing to ensure that the Finance Police had visually monitored the gulet. Had they done so, "a SAR event would have been declared, preventing the smugglers from bringing the gulet onto the sandbank" off the coast of Cutro.

The investigation thus identifies specific technical responsibilities, while the political responsibility of a series of governments, from right to left, who over the years have criminalized sea rescues and limited the Coast Guard's power of intervention remains outside the trial . It is therefore no coincidence that Minister of Infrastructure and Transport Matteo Salvini , under whose control some of the defendants are, intervened in defense of the defendants: "One word: shame. Putting six military personnel on trial, who risk their lives every day to save others. Shame," said the Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the League.