«Probably more could have been done. The helicopter could be raised to intercept it. If they went to port it probably wouldn’t have happened because the navigation was coherent, normal, safe, at least apparently, therefore, if they had gone to port it wouldn’t have happened.” This was said by Paolo Magistri, SAR expert of the Coast Guard – on duty in the Frontex operations room in Warsaw on the night of the Cutro shipwreck in which 94 people died, 35 of whom were minors at the conclusion of the interrogation carried out on 2 July in front of the Deputy Prosecutor of the Republic of Crotone, Matteo Staccini. Magistri is one of the three Italian experts who were on duty in the Frontex operations room on 26 February 2023 and who were interviewed as persons informed of the facts. The prosecutor also listened to Giovanni Ligas, Frontex team leader, and Vincenzo Walter Pascalicchio, law enforcement expert of the Financial Police. None of the three are under investigation.
From the interrogations, revealed by the program «The Horse and the Tower», it is clear that the Crotone Prosecutor’s Office – with the trial on the failure to provide assistance underway – wants to delve deeper into the classification part of the event. Ligas, questioned on 20 June 2026, was asked to justify the contradiction in the Frontex documents in the investigation documents: in the same report, in fact, the expression “possible migrant boat” is first read and then written a few lines later as “a small boat, believed to be a pleasure boat”. Ligas attributed the discrepancy to a clerical error by the delegate of the airline company that has the Frontex contract for border control. «From my perspective this is called ‘typò, a copy and paste because in the siting part, the elements that could be seen were clearly indicated…».
«Did you have a suspicion/almost certainty that that could have been a migrant boat?» the prosecutor asks Magistri who replies “Yes” specifying that “in reality, given the phone call in Turkey and the route they follow, which usually avoid some positions, it made us deduce that it was in any case a migratory event, which could also be done by three people, five. And for this reason a report was made to the Team leader, in agreement with the colleague who was there from Finance, as a law enforcement event”.