India's three ministries of home, law and external affairs have decided to allow the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to file charges against two Italian marines on board Enrica Lexie.

Charges will be filed under section 3 of the Suppression of Unlawful Acts against Safety of Maritime Navigation and Fixed Platforms on Continental Shelf Act, 2002, which provides for the death penalty. The marines, Salvatore Girone and Massimiliano Latorre, are facing trial for killing two Kerala fishermen in February 2012 while Enrica Lexie was sailing along the Indian coast on its way to Port Said in Egypt after offloading oil in Singapore.

The request by the NIA to prosecute the marines under section 3 was pending for a month as the home ministry had sought clarifications from the ministry of external affairs (MEA) regarding the assurance given to Italy early last year that the marines would not attract the death penalty. But on 9 January, the external affairs minister Salman Khurshid and law minister Kapil Sibal met home minister Sushil Kumar Shinde to resolve issues relating to the Italian marines' case.

The NIA has concluded in its probe that the marines had not issued any warning on the loudspeaker or fired warning shots before shooting the two fishermen.

When the two Italian marines had refused to return to India in January 2013 after being allowed to briefly visit Italy to cast their vote, India had called on the Italian government to send them back based on the assurance that the accused would not the face death penalty as the case did not fall in the "rarest of rare category".(Source: HIS Maritime)