The captain of a migrant boat that capsized in the Mediterranean's deadliest disaster in decades was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of causing the deaths of an estimated 800 people.

Prosecutors in the Sicilian city of Catania said they believed Tunisian national Mohammed Ali Malek, 27, was responsible for steering mistakes and the reckless overcrowding which led to the horrifying shipwreck off Libya on Sunday.

U.S. prosecutors charged a third man Friday for conspiring to overthrow the Gambian government last month in a failed coup ostensibly aimed at restoring democracy to the small west African nation.

Dual U.S.-Gambian citizen Alagie Barrow, 41, was charged for seeking to overthrow Gambian President Yahya Jammeh on December 30 with fellow dual national Papa Faal and U.S. resident Cherno Njie, whom they planned to then have serve as interim leader.

Gambian leader Yahya Jammeh has said Britain had no involvement with dissidents who tried to topple his government on December 30.

In a speech on state television late Saturday, Jammeh told members of the armed forces that “there is no evidence of British involvement in the attack on State House. There is no single Gambian dissident who came from Britain to support them" (the attackers).

Less than a week after an abortive coup attempt, Gambian president Yahya Jammeh handed the foreign and communications portfolios to journalists in a government reshuffle, officials said Tuesday.

Sheriff Bojang, publisher of The Standard newspaper, enters government as minister of information and communications, according to a presidential decree.

U.S. prosecutors on Monday charged two men with conspiring to overthrow the government of Gambia, in the latest fall-out from last week's failed coup attempt in the small West-African nation.

U.S.-Gambian dual national Papa Faal and U.S. resident Cherno Njie were arrested in the United States after they returned from Gambia, where they had travelled to help launch a December 30 coup attempt against President Yahya Jammeh's government, according to the U.S. Justice Department, which released the criminal complaint against the two men.

Hundreds of security force members held a rally in Gambia's capital Banjul Saturday in support of President Yahya Jammeh, four days after an attack on the presidential palace, witnesses said.

Several hundred soldiers, police, firemen and ambulance workers marched from the National Assembly to the presidential palace less than a kilometer away, the witnesses told AFP.

Gambian security forces went door-to-door in the capital Banjul on Friday in search of participants in a failed coup against the west African country's strongman President Yahya Jammeh, residents said.

Witnesses said the troops, who also set up checkpoints on roads leading out of the coastal city, were searching for suspects from Tuesday's assault on the presidential palace.

Gambian security forces clamped down in the capital Banjul on Friday, days after a failed coup against the west African country's strongman President Yahya Jammeh.

Soldiers set up checkpoints on the highway linking Banjul and the suburbs and were seen conducting patrols. Witnesses said that troops were combing the city for suspects from Tuesday's assault on the presidential palace.

The United States on Thursday denied it had any role in an apparent coup attempt in The Gambia, after the African nation's leader Yahya Jammeh blamed the attack on foreign dissidents.

"The U.S. government had no role in the events that took place in Banjul," a U.S. State Department official said. 

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon on Wednesday called for an investigation of an attempted coup to oust Gambia's President Yahya Jammeh as the Security Council met to discuss the turmoil.

Jammeh returned home to Banjul overnight after the failed bid to overthrow him while he was on a visit to Dubai as fears mounted of possible reprisals by his regime.