The coast guard, navy, merchant ships and aircraft were deployed in a massive search and rescue operation after the fishing vessel capsized in the Ionian Sea on Wednesday June 14. The sinking left at least 79 dead and hundreds missing and according to estimates from different organizations, between 400 and 750 people were traveling on the boat.
A fishing boat packed with migrants trying to reach Europe capsized and sank off the Greek coast on Wednesday, in one of the worst such shipwrecks so far this year.
Greece’s interim prime minister, Ioannis Sarmas, declared three days of national mourning. “We are with our thoughts on all the victims of the ruthless smugglers who exploit human unhappiness.”
A coast guard statement said efforts by its own ships and merchant ships to help the ship were repeatedly repulsed in the first minutes of the disaster.
Coast guard officials said the ship’s engines broke down around 1:40 a.m. local time.
After about 60 minutes, the ship began to tilt abruptly from one side to the other, and 10 or 15 minutes after this, it sank, according to the statement from the authorities.
“The outer deck was full of people, and we assume that the inside of the boat would have been full as well. It seems as if there was a shift among the people who were crowded on board, and it capsized,” said coast guard spokesman Nikos Alexiou, on state television ERT.
And while Alexiou claimed it was “impossible to know how many people were on board”, the deputy mayor of the southern port city of Kalamata claimed that according to his information there were “more than 500 people” on board.
The UN migration agency, IOM, for its part estimated that the ship was carrying between 700 and 750 people, including at least 40 children. A fact that he made known after the interviews carried out with the survivors.
The reports also indicated that at least 104 people were rescued after the sinking in international waters; Twenty-five survivors between the ages of 16 and 49 were hospitalized with hypothermia or fever after being found some 75 kilometers southwest of the Peloponnese peninsula in southern Greece.
This area is close to the deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea and depths reach up to 5,200 meters, a factor that rescuers say could hamper any effort to locate the ship.
Constantinos Vlachonikolos, a rescue volunteer, said almost all the survivors were men and Katerina Tsata, the head of a group of Red Cross volunteers in Kalamata, said the migrants also received psychological support: “They suffered a very strong blow, both physical and mentally,” he told The Associated Press (AP) news agency.
The victims and their families
As a massive rescue operation unfolded on Thursday, relatives of the migrants came from all over the world to meet in the southern port city of Kalamata.
They all came to find out the status of their loved ones, asked for their reports or tried to offer their help in the search.
On the side of the survivors, Erasmia Roumana, head of a delegation from the United Nations refugee agency, said that many wanted to “get in touch with their families to tell them that they are okay, and they keep asking about the missing. Many have missing friends and family.”
Mohamed Abdi Marwan, speaking by phone from Kobani, a Kurdish-majority city in north-eastern Syria, explained that his relatives, including a 14-year-old boy, were on the boat.
Despite not having established contact with them or having any news that could advance their state of health, Marwan is hopeful that his nephew, Ali Sheikhi, 29, is alive.
“Those smugglers were only supposed to have 500 on the ship and now we hear there were 750. What is this? Are they cattle or humans? How can they do this?” Said Marwan, in an interview where he also indicated that each of his relatives was charged $6,000 for the trip.
Kassem Abu Zeed, a Syrian refugee in Hamburg, Germany, took the first flight to Greece after learning of the disaster. His wife and his brother-in-law were on board the ship full of migrants that sank.
“The last time we spoke was eight days ago, and she told me that she was getting ready to get on the ship. She had paid $5,000 to the smugglers, and then we all know what happened,” Abu Zeed told AP.
Abu Zeed, 34, recounts how his wife, Esra Aoun, 21, and his 19-year-old brother, Abdullah, decided to risk everything to dangerously cross from Libya to Italy on a battered ship after they exhausted all their options to reunite. legally with him in Germany.
And despite the fact that the retired admiral of the Greek coast guard, Nikos Spanos, has declared that “the chances of finding more survivors are minimal”, Abu Zeed is hopeful that at least his brother could be among the men found from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories, some of whom are temporarily housed in a Kalamata warehouse, and others in recovery rooms at special hypothermia and exposure hospitals.
The IOM has listed the route from North Africa to Italy through the central Mediterranean as the deadliest in the world.
According to the agency, since 2014 there have been more than 21,000 deaths and disappearances on these routes.
The shipwreck with the most deaths in the Mediterranean before the one that occurred this Wednesday, June 14, was recorded on April 18, 2015 when a crowded fishing boat collided off Libya with a cargo ship that was trying to rescue it.
Forensic experts concluded that there were originally 1,100 people on board. Only 28 survived.
With AP and local media.
