Greek coast guard faces difficult questions over its handling of a migrant tragedy
Some survivors claim their migrant-filled trawler capsized after the coast guard tried to tow it
Survivors of a June 14 shipwreck off Greece’s west coast gave Al Jazeera conflicting reports of how their migrant-laden vessel sank.
Witnesses from among 104 survivors said 750 were on board. Eighty two bodies were recovered from the scene, 47 miles off Pylos in the Ionian Sea, after their fishing trawler capsized around 2am local time.
Among those feared drowned in the hull of the ship are some 100 children and teenagers, mainly from Syria, Al Jazeera was told.
“There were women, girls and boys – 13, 14, 15 years old. There were 6 or 7 women with children and there were families,” said Mohammed Alhosary from Egypt, who paid $4,000 for the voyage.
Alhosary said the trawler sank because it was overloaded. “From the moment we embarked on the ship it swayed from side to side constantly. And when it did so for the last time, we thought it was going to be like all the other times, but it wasn’t,” he said.
By the fifth day at sea, Alhosary said, the trawler’s engine was starting and stopping.
“While the ship was moving, it had some balance. But when it stopped it started to lurch,” he said. He believes that is why the trawler sank.
He described the first moments after the sinking.
“When the boat capsized, I was swimming among corpses. We went five or six metres down into the water. I wanted to get to the surface, but others were holding onto me. As soon as I got to the surface I saw corpses, and someone was pulling me. For a long time I was trying to break free and someone was holding onto my clothes, and I tried to take my clothes off so they couldn’t hold me. There were many who didn’t know how to swim,” he said.
Others believe the Hellenic Coast Guard, which was present at the time of the sinking and witnessed it, was partly to blame for it.
Another Egyptian survivor from Ismailiyah said the coast guard caused the capsizing by attempting to tow the trawler to safety. He used the pseudonym Mahmud Shallabi.
"The coast guard tied a rope to the port side of the bows,” Shallabi said. As the coast guard towed the trawler, “the boat lurched side to side, and when they cut the rope, it lurched suddenly.”
“We were stable to begin with,” said Shallabi, “and when they started towing us, we began to lurch… they should have pulled up alongside to stabilise us and had someone else help [with towing]. They towed us only a short distance and then cut the rope.”
What the coast guard says
The coast guard admits one of its high seas patrol vessels was at the scene, but initially denied it had any physical contact with the trawler. Its captain said the trawler’s engine failed at 1:40am on June 14. Within 20 minutes, he said, he saw the boat lurch violently to starboard, then to port, then to starboard again, and capsize.
"The fishing boat was 25 to 30 metres long. Its deck was full of people, and we assume the interior was just as full," coastguard spokesman Nikolaos Alexiou told state TV ERT on the day the boat sank. "You cannot divert a boat with so many people on board by force unless there is cooperation," he said.
That story changed after the leftwing Syriza opposition leader Alexis Tsipras visited the dock in Kalamata and spoke with survivors the following day.
One video showed a survivor telling Tsipras that the boat had capsized after the coastguard had attempted to drag it at excessive speed. "So the Greek coast guard used a rope to drag you, and that is how you sank?" the leftist leader asked.
Government spokesman Ilias Siakantaris went on television on Friday, to admit that the coast guard vessel had offered a rope to “stabilize” the boat, but that it had been refused. "There was never an attempt to tie the vessel, neither by us nor any other ship," he said.
But Al Jazeera now has further testimony repeating the theory that there had been a tow.
There are also questions about the coast guard’s claim that throughout June 13, the trawler sped towards Italy, covering 30 nautical miles and refusing all help except food and water.
But Alarm Phone, an emergency hotline for refugees that was independently in touch with the trawler, made public an email in which it informed the coast guard that the trawler was “in distress” at 5pm, almost nine hours before the coast guard said the trawler’s engines failed.
Alarm Phone did not specify whether the boat had suffered loss of power or control, but a separate investigation by the BBC found that MarineTraffic beacons suggested merchant ships involved in aiding the trawler hovered around the spot where it later sank from about 3pm onwards. The Greek coast guard has rejected the MarineTraffic evidence.
Finally, there are questions about when the coast guard was present on the scene.
The coast guard said its vessel departed Chania, in western Crete, at about 3:30pm and reached the trawler at 10:40pm. That would mean that a vessel whose top speed is 32 knots would have taken seven hours to cover about 170 miles to known co-ordinates – which should have taken five and a half hours.
The Hellenic Coast Guard points to the fact that it has saved tens of thousands of lives at sea in the past few years, and that once boats are overfilled and sent off the north African coast, receiving coast guards are facing a dangerous situation whatever they do.
Past tragedy
That any suspicion hovers over the HCG is because tows have gone wrong before, and because of the HCG's growing reputation for pushing migrants back.
This latest tragedy is reminiscent of one in February 2014, when the coast-guard caused a sailing boat to capsize off Farmakonisi in the east Aegean by towing it at high speed. Eleven Afghan women and children were drowned in its hold. The three fathers and husbands, who survived, said the coast guard had been trying to tow them back towards Turkey. The coast guard claimed it was towing them to Farmakonisi, but the fathers said, “we knew we were going to Turkey, because the lights on the shore there were orange, whereas the lights on Farmakonisi were white.”
Three simultaneous investigations were wound up before publishing conclusions.
Such pushbacks became more the norm after March 2020, when Turkey announced it would no longer abide by the terms of a Statement with the EU whereby both sides pledged to hold back and readmit irregular migrants.
Relatives of the passengers were arriving in Greece to find their loved ones. A few were lucky. Many were not. Ahmad Ayadi Shoaib travelled from Italy to Malakasa reception camp, 40km north of Athens, looking for his nephew, Mohammed. Malakasa is where survivors were taken to be documented.
“I had invited my nephew officially, but he came on his own,” said Shoaib. “He was one of 33 boys, all 17 years old, who left without their fathers’ consent and went to Libya.”
Once in the smugglers’ clutches, Mohammed had second thoughts. “When he got to Libya he asked for money to go back to Egypt,” said Shoaib. “But the smugglers demanded money from the boys’ fathers or they said they would kill the boys.”
Shoabi did not find Mohammed on the day Al Jazeera spoke to him. His nephew, along with dozens of his friends, may be at the bottom of the Ionian Sea.
The human toll of this tragedy led one survivor to return home. Usman Siddique, a policeman from Gudjarat, in eastern Pakistan, had originally set out to make a better living in Europe for his wife and son. After talking to his father on the phone, he decided to go home.
“After two months [away] I was talking to my father and mother. He was crying day and night, saying ‘come back, come back to home, come back to home.’ It’s a very tough time for me any mother and father.”