Sinking of F174

[1] La Repubblica reporter Giovanni Maria Bellu finally broke the story, leading to much soul searching in Italy over the indifference to the fate of illegal immigrants.

[2] Illegal migrants traveled along many different routes, all of them controlled by human traffickers from Turkey and Kurdistan, from the Indo-Pakistani region and assembled in Cairo and Alexandria, hoping to reach the coast of Italy.

After 12 days of waiting for a new group of migrants, they were moved to a new ship, a Maltese freighter named the Iohan El Hallal (or Yohan according to some sources), flying a Honduran flag.

On December 24 (or possibly 25), the ship sailed for international waters, where the passengers were secretly unloaded onto another boat, codenamed F174 (actual name unknown).

[4] After the fishing vessel showed signs of instability due to the extreme load, about a hundred migrants were sent back to the Iohan, leaving over 300[1] (317 according to some survivors) to begin the final leg of their trip.

From January 2, Portopalo fishermen began to find corpses, body parts and personal belongings in their nets, but did not alert the local police.

Notifying the Capitaneria di Porto could have meant being questioned or, worse, having ships and equipment impounded for investigations without any financial compensation at a time where the fishing season was at its peak.

[5] Those who brought back some of the corpses were threatened with bureaucratic obstruction and lost ten days of work before having their ships restored to them.

Through a friend living in Rome, Lupo contacted journalist Giovanni Maria Bellu, who was investigating rumors about the sinking, and gave him the coordinates.

In 2001, Bellu managed to send a remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV) to the seabed to film the wreck and the skeletons of the victims.

[8] The Siracusa Prosecutor's Office had begun an official inquiry after the first articles by Bello, but after the wreck was found, was forced to abandon any prosecution since the ship was in international waters, not under Italian jurisdiction.

F174's captain and a Pakistani smuggler were accused of "aggravated multiple voluntary homicide", while the charges against any other crew member of both F174 and the Iohan were dropped.

During the proceedings, relatives of the victims from India, Sri Lanka and Pakistan asked to be heard, but Italian embassy denied them visas.

Balwant Singh Khera, a spiritual leader of the Pakistani community, staged a demonstration along with four fellow countryman in the Via della Conciliazione in Rome in 1998.

He made speeches explaining to pilgrims walking to the Vatican the tragic story of the sunken ship, but was held and threatened by the police.

He told how he spent $7000 to travel from Karachi to Damasco and Latakia, where he boarded a ship called Alex, being later reshipped to the Ena, the Friendship, and finally the Iohan.

Shahab stated that the Iohan's captain, Youssef El Hallal, prohibited his passengers from throwing ropes to the drowning people.

The tragedy remained unknown to the general public for five years, until Bellu made available the photographs of the wreck taken by the ROV and he published his book Ghosts of Portopalo.

Coincidentally, the day before the tragedy, migrants staged a demonstration in Piazza Colonna in Rome and a hunger strike to assert their "right to exist".

Relatives of the Pakistani victims succeeded in joining forces thanks to Mr. Zabiullah, father of one of the deceased, and worked together to trace the whole chain of people and organizations managing the human traffic from Pakistan, to Greece and Italy, led by Turkish criminals, Greek shipowners, Kurd warlords and Italian Mafia.

[11] Requests by locals citizens, European civil rights associations and Portuguese government to Silvio Berlusconi's administration to recover the wreckage and corpses went unheard.

The same happened to any call for a broader inquiry about the human traffic in the Mediterranean and the lack of action by local officers who got a hint of the tragedy.

A few theater plays have been written about the tragedy, the most famous being La Nave Fantasma (Ghost Ship), with dramatic actor and comedian Bebo Storti.