Seventy-eight bodies have been found and more than 500 people are missing and presumed dead after a boat carrying migrants capsized to the southwest of Greece on Wednesday in a catastrophe that marks one of the deadliest shipwrecks ever to take place in the Mediterranean.
Another 104 people were rescued by authorities.
As per eyewitnesses, there are many children among the hundreds still missing — the majority of around 750 individuals on board the old fishing vessel, many of whom are Egyptians.
Following the incident, protests broke out around Greece calling for accountability and for an investigation into the tragedy, with many criticizing European authorities for failing to take steps in recent years during which unsafe migratory routes have operated in the Mediterranean Sea to facilitate safe passage and prevent such tragedies from taking place.
Mada Masr reviewed available records and spoke to a number of the passengers’ families who told the story of how their relatives went through hostage-like situations in Libya and were held until their families paid sums of money in the thousands of dollars in order to secure their passage on the boat that sank off Greece’s southwest coast in the early hours of Wednesday.
In undertaking these journeys, those wishing to migrate become a playing card in political negotiations between various governments and authorities in Egypt, Libya and Europe.
An entire day of drowning
Activists and search and rescue NGOs say that the Hellenic Coast Guard, the Greek shipping ministry and the Italian, Maltese and Greek search and rescue authorities were notified of the boat’s whereabouts and that 750 people were on board, but that they did not intervene to rescue the passengers.
Greek authorities, meanwhile, have said that the trawler did not request assistance from them.
At 9:30 am CET on June 13, a distress call was received by Italy-based activist Nawal Soufi from a boat carrying over 750 passengers. They said they were without water after four days of sailing.
By 11:00 am, the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre informed Greek authorities that a boat carrying a large number of migrants was in international waters to the southwest of the Peloponnese. By 2 pm, the Hellenic Coast Guard was in contact with the distressed boat, according to official records cited in the Greek press, however, no immediate rescue was made.
By 4 pm, Alarm Phone, an activist hotline for migrants in distress in the Mediterranean, was informed of the boat’s situation and had established the location of the trawler after speaking with passengers on board.
The self-organized hotline then sent an email to Greek authorities, as well as to the European Union coastguard agency FRONTEX and the Greece office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees at 4:53 pm.
Within an hour, Soufi published a recorded phone conversation in which people on board can be heard informing her that six individuals on the trawler had already died, with the sounds of screams and panic clear in the background of the call. “Some people had died due to the lack of water,” said an Egyptian national who survived the incident recalling the events of Tuesday night in a video published on Facebook.
Between the hours of 6 pm and 9 pm, according to records from the operations room at the Greek shipping ministry published Wednesday, two trade vessels, one Maltese and one Greek offered the trawler food and water supplies.
The Greek ministry also said that further assistance was offered until 9 pm to the 750 people on board by one of the trade vessels, the HCG and the ministry, but that people on the boat who spoke English “refused” help and said they wished to continue to Italy.
The Greek shipping ministry’s operations center, however, recounts that at 1:40 am on June 14th, someone on board the trawler informed the Greek Shipping Ministry’s operations center that the engine had malfunctioned and was no longer turning. According to the ministry, the HCG approached the trawler to try and determine the problem. At 2:04 am, an official on board the HCG boat informed the ministry that the fishing vessel “took a right, then a sharp left and another right so great that it resulted in the fishing vessel overturning.”
It’s not clear what exactly caused the ship to overturn in the early hours of Wednesday morning. What is clear is that the vessel was no longer able to move at this point. Survivors implied that a Greek vessel attempting to tow the boat to safety caused it to overturn, a narrative that was denied by the official Greek account.
“Then 10 to 15 minutes later the boat completely sank,” the operations center’s records read. “A number of passengers on the outer decks fell into the sea.”
A broad-scale rescue operation was later initiated, the records conclude.
Though the Egyptians who were aboard the trawler come from disparate villages across the country, their families, speaking separately to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, told similar stories indicating a consistent pattern whereby once in Libya, migrants are subject to a hostage situation.
Migration becomes a hostage situation
Though the Egyptians who were aboard the trawler come from disparate villages across the country, their families, speaking separately to Mada Masr on condition of anonymity, told similar stories indicating a consistent pattern whereby, once in Libya, they were subject to a hostage situation.
Those wishing to migrate first set off to Libya, where they are received by a group of smugglers who take them to what’s referred to as “the warehouse.” Smugglers then communicate with their families to demand payment of a fixed sum of LE140,00 ( around US$4,500) from each of them.
“I didn’t know my son had traveled,” said the father of 14-year-old Mohamed Khaled Abdel Shafiya Dessouky, one of the several children who were on board the fishing vessel from Naamna village in Sharqiya Governorate. The first time Dessouky’s father learned of it, was when he received an anonymous call from Libya, informing him that his son was there and that he should pay LE140,000 in order to secure his son’s permission to migrate.
“I couldn’t refuse as he threatened to shoot my son if I didn’t pay,” he said. “Paying up wasn’t just for my son to travel, but for his life.” Dessouky’s father works in agriculture and described putting together the money quickly by borrowing from lots of people he knows in the village.
Afterward, he received another anonymous call telling him that a woman wearing a niqab would meet him in the village cemetery within an hour to receive the money. “When I arrived there, I found two other families from the same village delivering the same amount of money for the same reason.”
A few days later, his son rang him from a phone dedicated specifically for that purpose in the possession of one of the smugglers. His father tried to convince him not to travel, but his 14-year-old son insisted, saying that doing so would allow him to get a better education.
A few more days passed, until his son called him once again, asking him to transfer LE200 to buy food, as he was hungry most of the time as he wasn’t being given any food.
The father tried calling the same phone later and confirmed that the boat had departed and his son was on board.
Once news of the boat’s capsizing had spread, the father learned that it was not only the three families’ children who had left the village, but 13 boys in total.
A similar series of events was described by three other families from different villages and towns who spoke to Mada Masr. People would first travel to Libya, then their families would receive similar anonymous calls demanding the same amount of money along with threats in the case of non-payment.
The sum of money is like a “ransom,” said Mohamed, the brother of Ayman Abdel Aziz, one of those still missing, saying that after speaking to other families he realized that they had to make the payment even if their relatives changed their minds about crossing the Mediterranean. “If they don’t, then it becomes a hostage situation,” said Mohamed. “He won’t necessarily be killed, but he won’t come back unless the money is paid.”
Various families tried to make contact with their relatives on board the ship after news of the tragedy using the same phones via which they had spoken with them prior, or tried to reach out to the people who had contacted them for money. Mada Masr, too, reached out via numbers they were given by the families, but all of the phones were out of service.
Who is responsible?
With Egyptian nationals thought to represent a substantial number of the 500 people who are still missing, Egyptian authorities took two days to respond to the tragedy.
Expressing its condolences, Egypt’s Foreign Ministry published a statement two days after the incident condemning “organized gangs for illegal migration” for “exploiting the need of some who are seeking better opportunities for life and work, risking their lives and losing hope.”
The Foreign Ministry statement pointed to the “decisive measures” Egypt has taken to confront “illegal migration” in recent years, consisting of tough penal measures and supposed security measures to police its borders.
Greek authorities are pointing to nine people who were on board the ship, all Egyptian nationals according to Greek television channel ERT World, arresting them on suspicion of setting up a criminal organization, manslaughter by negligence, exposure to danger, and causing a shipwreck. Denying that their relatives were involved, family members of two of the Egyptian nationals charged in Greece told Mada Masr that their relatives left for Libya just a few weeks ago, hoping to travel to Europe.
But beyond the official response, the roots remain the same. The European Union’s obsession with border control has granted authorities in places like Egypt and Libya leverage to demand large amounts of money in exchange for securing departures from their borders, while the EU turns a blind eye to human rights violations.
In Libya, Khalifa Haftar, head of the Libyan National Army in eastern Libya, managed to play the card of the escalating migration crisis to press European politicians on one side and allowed his affiliates to run or cooperate with networks of migrants smugglers to make a lot money off it amid a financial crisis they face, according to a report published by Mada Masr last week.
The European Union signed an 80 million euro funding agreement with Egypt back in October 2022 as part of a border management program. Through the funding, the EU aims to “develop the capacities of the Egyptian defense ministry as well as other stakeholders in the government and for the civil society to apply “rights-based, protection-oriented and gender-sensitive approaches” in border management, as carried out in a statement by the EU delegation in Cairo.
Over the past years and up until now, the policies of extricating European borders towards North Africa continue to push migrants and refugees to take more dangerous migration routes and result in more deaths in the Mediterranean.