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| - Human rights activists urged prosecutors in Rome Thursday to determine whether Italy was complicit in the deaths in April of 12 migrants and the illegal pushback of children to crisis-hit Libya. In mid-April, Malta's Repubblika civil rights organisation filed two police reports alleging criminal inaction on the part of Maltese Prime Minister Robert Abela and the chief of the armed forces for the same shipwreck. Both were later cleared of wrongdoing by a magisterial inquiry. The documents filed Thursday by a disparate group, including the Open Arms rescue charity, several lawyers and a senator, allege Italian authorities knew a rubber dinghy had run in trouble in the Mediterranean but did nothing to help. Five days passed before the migrants were picked up by a fishing boat sailing under a Libyan flag and returned to Libya. In the meantime, 12 had perished, either of exhaustion or by drowning, the group said in a statement. "The 51 survivors, including two very young children, were returned against their will to the Tarek al Sika detention centre, one of the most notorious in Tripoli," it said. The boat set off from Libya on April 9, with 63 people on board, mainly Eritreans, Ethiopians and Sudanese. The next day it ran into difficulty and alerted hotline Alarm Phone, which "immediately warned Malta and Rome". Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, had also spotted the dinghy and three other boats during a plane patrol, and flagged them all up to Valletta and Rome, it said. The dinghy was in Malta's Search and Rescue (SAR) zone, but physically much closer to the Italian island of Lampedusa -- between 25 and 30 nautical miles away, "a distance a (coastguard) motorboat could cover in less than an hour". Malta eventually flagged the emergency to all ships in the area late on April 14. While a Portuguese cargo ship in the vicinity tracked down the dinghy, it merely monitored it, until "a strange fishing boat arrived on the scene". It was the "Dar El Salam, sailing under a Libyan flag with an Egyptian crew but based out of Malta," the statement said. By the time it arrived, seven migrants had drowned and two had died of exhaustion. The Dar El Salam recovered the survivors and headed to Tripoli -- despite Lampedusa being so close. On the journey to Libya, three other migrants, weakened by the days at sea, also died, it said. "As the tragedy took place in the enormous Maltese SAR zone, general attention has been focused on Malta's behaviour and the decision's Valletta took," the group said. "But in fact, it's clear Italy also holds a grave responsibility", it said, accusing Rome of "silence, omissions,incomprehensible choices, the offloading of responsibility, or at least criminal indifference". It said that Italy had "been complicit in or in any case endorsed the abandonment at sea for five days" of the migrants, and called on the prosecutors to open an investigation into the alleged violation of a series of human rights. ide
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