Rescue workers have described the moment they confronted the lying ship's captain moments after they searched a 'cemetery in the sea' for the bodies of hundreds of migrants who were killed in one of the Mediterranean's worst disasters.
Around 900 men, women and children are believed to have died after their boat got into difficulty and overturned off Libyan waters, south of the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, shortly after midnight on Sunday.
Rescuers revealed how Tunisian skipper Mohammed Ali Malek lied to them about being responsible when they accused him over being the captain - using a fake name that he kept forgetting.
The 27-year-old has since been arrested for multiple manslaughter.
Doctor Giuseppe Pomilla of the Order of Malta described the three hours he searched for the living among hundreds of dead floating corpses. He said: 'It was like a nightmare. It was a cemetery. There were bodies everywhere you looked.
'At first it seemed there was no one alive. It was 1am and the sea was black. With my torch I could see only two or three metres ahead of the dinghy. But it was easy to see if people were dead because when you died of asphyxia your eyes go red.
'Everywhere was these red eyes, all young men. Most were in T-shirts and normal clothes but some were naked. Maybe the current washed their clothes away.'
Dr Pomilla said that he had immediately identified the suspected captain of the traffickers, who was pale skinned, and joked about it when he first met him on the merchant ship that had saved his life, after being called to help the stricken boat.
He added: 'I said "You're the trafficker then". He said "No, no". Then he laughed.
'We asked him what his name was but it was obvious that he had given the wrong name as the next time someone asked him he forgot it and couldn't remember it for a few moments.
'I have been doing this job so long I see who is the trafficker straight away. It's written on their face. And they are always in much better shape than the others who are normally exhausted and tired.'
Nurse Enrico Vitiello, also with the Order of Malta and working on the Coast Guard vessel, said that the two suspected traffickers had kept themselves apart from the other survivors.
He said: ‘We knew it was them. They didn’t want to be with the others. They just wanted to stay on their own. One black guy once put his arm on the Tunisian guy’s shoulder and he immediately pushed him off.’
Malek was later charged with multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and aiding illegal immigration.
Prosecutors claim he contributed to the disaster by mistakenly ramming the overcrowded fishing boat into a merchant ship that had come to its rescue.
They claimed as a result of this collision the migrants on board shifted position on the boat, which was already off balance, causing it to overturn.
He was arrested along with his alleged smuggler accomplice, a 26-year-old Syrian crew member named Mahmud Bikhit, who was charged with 'aiding illegal immigration'.
Meanwhile, one survivor told La RepubblicaMalek was drunk when he collided with the King Jacob.
'The captain was drinking wine,' the survivor claimed.
'He was drunk and he smoked hashish while he was at the helm a little while before the boat hit the Portuguese container ship.'
While they were searching the waters Dr Pomilla said a man from the coast guard heard a cry for help in English. The boy from Mali aged 18 or 19 did not know how to swim but was clinging to an inflatable life belt, he said.
Other survivors were seen clinging to dead bodies as they waited for help from the Maltese and Italian coastguards who came to rescue them in the middle of the night.
The survivors were told that all the women and children on the boat had been sitting below deck and had been trapped when the ship went down. Some survivors said they died like 'rats in cages'.
People rescued were grateful to be alive but devastated to have lost their friends, Pomilla added.
'I helped one of the boys get dry and gave him a change of clothes, and took him down to see the nurse,' he said.
'Then I heard him crying, his head in his hands. He hugged me and said he was crying because of his friends that had not made it. Another asked if he could look at the bodies for his sister.'
