Court convicts three Syrians over fatal Aegean boat trip
A court in southern Germany on Friday convicted three Syrian men aged 24, 27 and 34 over the drowning of 13 migrants off the Aegean island of Leros in September 2015, when the European refugee crisis was at its peak.
The court in Traunstein handed a four-year prison sentence to the 27-year-old, a two-and-a-half-year term to the 24-year-old and a suspended two-year sentence to the 34-year-old. The court found the three men guilty of “professional smuggling of people resulting in death.”
In that crossing from Turkey nearly two years ago, the smuggling boat struck a freighter, resulting in the deaths of 13 of the 46 people that had been aboard. All three defendants had come to Germany as refugees on the same journey.
