Today is Tuesday, September 7th, 2021.

On this day in 1984, seven members of Malta's Coast Guard perished while disposing of illegal fireworks.

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Welcome to Today in True Crime, a Spotify original from Parkast.

Today we'll be talking about the C-23 tragedy, an explosion that claimed the lives of several sailors

and policemen off the coast of Malta.

It remains the most disastrous peacetime loss the armed forces of Malta has ever experienced.

Now let's go back to September 7, 1984, as the crew of patrol boat C-23 prepared to cast off.

The men loaded up their boat with a cache of fireworks. The Maltese police had seized the

illegal pyrotechnics the previous day, and standard procedure was to get rid of them at sea.

Their boat, C-23, was a solid ship. The United States Navy had given her to the armed forces of Malta in 1971,

and she'd served reliably. During the Vietnam War, sailors referred to the vessels as

...