Editorial

A Tunisian fishing vessel came upon a gruesome find, a few days ago: a decapitated and decomposing corpse. The boat owner informed the Tunisian coast authorities. These informed the coast guard in Rome. The Rome authorities instructed the Armed Forces of Malta to deal with the case because, they claimed, the location came under Maltese jurisdiction.

By this time the Tunisian fishing vessel had gone on its way, but before doing so it had taken the precaution of attaching a buoy to the headless body.

The AFM declined to follow the instructions it had received from Rome. An AFM spokesman gave as reasons the fact that as the corpse was closer to Lampedusa than Malta, it was not responsible for the coordination of the search and rescue area and it was not informed of the exact location of the corpse. The spokesman also added that there was no international convention that bound the army to retrieve corpses from the sea. Its aim was to save lives at sea and "not create a possible risk for our personnel".

Since some of those reactions hold little water, they bear questioning. Why did the spokesman not explain what possible risk there was to an AFM crew recovering a dead body from the sea? One would have thought a live body in a state of great panic presents a far riskier proposition. And if it is correct that no international convention binds a country to retrieve corpses from the sea, is it not equally correct that such retrieval does not require an international convention? A sense of humanity does. If the AFM was not informed of the exact location of the corpse, what did it do to discover that location from the Rome authorities?

At one level, then, the behaviour of the AFM on this occasion seems to have been on the gauche side. Having said that, it is abundantly clear that in the event there were a number of lacunae that now need to be addressed if incidents like these are not to sour relations between Malta and Italy. An Italian MP, Donato Mosella, has raised the issue with the Italian transport minister and called the matter "a disconcerting incident". It certainly was.

Worse, it is obvious that the incident could have been more happily settled if communications were better and areas of responsibilities were more delineated so as to leave no doubt as to whose responsibility it was to fish out the body of the unfortunate person. The thought that the corpse is still floating around the Mediterranean is abhorrent.

A corpse, especially one that has become so as a consequence of decapitation, deserves far more respect than given to the one discovered in the Sicilian channel, apart, of course, from the investigations that should have been opened to determine what led to the decapitation.

It is self-evident that the Maltese and Italian authorities need to clean up their act so that future incidents like this are dealt with efficiently, swiftly and professionally. The last thing that is required during a crisis or unfortunate event is for neighbours to be at odds with each other.

We would have thought that the Rome authorities should not be in a position to pass on instructions to the AFM, only information through the correct channels. It is those channels that must decide under whose jurisdiction a corpse, or a live body for that matter, falls should either have the misfortune to end up in the sea.