Crime

Reports stated that the man survived and was arrested by Italian police and being held in Calabria.

I found an Italian langauge report identifying him by the initials "H.A." and saying he was being held in the prison of Locri.

I kept searching in Italian - a language I do not speak, and I found this article from a few days ago in 2025 and had it autotranslated:

He has been indicted and in mid-September the trial will begin, before the judges of the Court of Assizes of Locri, for Hawkar Musa Hamad, the 36-year-old Iraqi citizen arrested at the end of June 2024 on charges of voluntary homicide, with the aggravating circumstance of having committed the crime against an underage girl.

The man is one of only 11 survivors, who arrived at the port of Roccella in mid-June 2024, of the tragic shipwreck that occurred about a year ago in the Ionian Sea about 120 miles (over 200 kilometers) away from the Ionian coast of Calabria and in which, following the semi-sinking of a sailboat less than 15 meters long, More than 50 migrants of various nationalities died, including women and children.

Gazzetta Del Sud

Now that we have his name, I started searching to see if I could get more details from an article that isn't paywalled - so far there is just an autotranslated blogged version of the above.

I popped Hawkar Musa Hamad into Facebook, and it retrieved several hits of different men who all share the name 'Hawker Hamad' or 'Hamkar Hamid,' with nearly all of them being connected back to Iraq (some in Arbil, which I know is Kurdish). So, it appears that the name is ethnic Kurdish. Two accounts are private and share nothing, and one or two seem to be active with just actual posts by people not in prison in Italy right now. It may be the case that one of the two private accounts could have belonged to the perpetrator, but who knows.

So, I think I have exhausted the available information without purchasing a subscription to an Italian newspaper.

It's certainly an interesting case.

It is also noteworthy that the perpetrators age was initially identified as 27 in some places, but now is 36.