An Italian court has sentenced a people smuggler to 20 years in prison for involvement in a shipwreck last year that killed at least 94 migrants. The court in the southern city of Crotone found Gun Ufuk, a 29-year-old Turkish national, guilty of crimes including causing a shipwreck and aiding illegal immigration. It also ordered him to pay a €3m fine and pay damages to civil plaintiffs. Ufuk, who denied being in charge of the boat, was one of four alleged human smugglers on a migrant vessel that went down in stormy weather off the coast of Calabria on 26 February last year. The wooden boat, which was carrying about 180 migrants from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan and Syria, including many children, had departed Turkey and went down metres from the shore. It was the deadliest migrant shipwreck to occur so close to the coastline in Italy since October 2013 when 368 people died when their boat sank off the island of Lampedusa. For days after last year’s shipwreck, bodies and debris washed up on the beaches of the area. One suspected smuggler died in the shipwreck, while two others are facing trial. Ufuk told the court on Wednesday that he was hired to be the boat’s mechanic but was never at the helm. “I had to flee Turkey for political reasons,” he told the court, explaining how he had been jailed for criticising President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. After the shipwreck, the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, pledged to crack down on human smugglers, including handing out tougher sentences and giving preferential quotas to workers from countries who help fight smugglers. Her far-right Brothers of Italy party won elections in 2022 on a promise to curb the arrivals of migrants by sea. The country arrested about 250 boat drivers in 2023, according to a report published by NGOs last month, with the majority Egyptian nationals piloting vessels carrying migrants from Libya or Tunisia. Italy is one of the main landing points for people trying to enter Europe, but the “central Mediterranean route” is considered one of the world’s most dangerous.