Three distress calls via satellite were totally ignored. Two hours of waiting at sea. Only to discover that Italy hadn’t dispatched any aircraft, any Navy ship, any Coast Guard patrol boat.
On the contrary, the Italian operations centre informed the refugees adrift at 100 kilometres from Lampedusa that they were supposed to call Malta – which was at least 230 kilometres away.
Two hours wasted: from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. that Friday, October 11th. Had Italians been activated sooner, or had they immediately passed the alarm on to their colleagues in Valletta, the carnage could have been avoided.
