Police announced on Wednesday (June 25) that they had arrested an Iraqi man who is accused of strangling to death a teenage girl on board a boat that sank off southern Italy in mid-June.

In a statement, police said the boat was adrift off Italy when the man "vented his aggression on a 16-year-old Iraqi girl, the daughter of another survivor, leading to her death by suffocation."

The Italian news agency AGI reported that the man had also raped the girl. When asked by AFP, a police spokesperson would not confirm this. According to AGI, the suspect is 27 years old.

The man accused of murder has been taken into custody in Catanzaro, the capital of the Calabria region, police said.

Dozens of people died when a sailing boat carrying around 70 migrants from Turkey capsized around 120 nautical miles off the southern Italian coast on June 17.

The bodies of 35 victims, including 15 minors, were recovered from the water in search efforts. Twelve people were rescued from the shipwreck and brought to the port of Roccella Ionica. One survivor, a woman, then died.

Kurdistan arrests

The news follows the arrest on Tuesday of four suspected human smugglers in Iraq's Kurdistan in connection with the shipwreck.

Most of those on the sailing boat were Kurdish migrants from Iraq and Iran, according to non-government organizations and accounts from victims' families. There were also reportedly Afghans and Syrians on board.

Also read: Italy: Three more bodies recovered, around 60 still missing from migrant shipwreck

So far this year, more than 1,000 people have died while trying to cross the Mediterranean. The actual number of deaths is said to be much higher, with many departures and shipwrecks going unrecorded.

The Ionian Sea, where the June 17 shipwreck happened, lies on the Central Mediterranean route, which is one of the deadliest migration routes in the world.

With AFP, AGI