Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 24th of August 2019

Case name: 2019_08_24-CM184
Situation: 103 travelers (3 women, 2 children) in the Central Mediterranean, probably intercepted by the so-called Libyan coast guard with European participation
Status of WTM Investigation: Unconfirmed
Place of Incident: Central Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case:

On Saturday, 24th of August at 4:45pm CEST the Alarm Phone received a call from a group of travelers who had started from Libya 32 hours before. The line was cut but after some attempts, we got through to them again and learned that there were 103 people, among them 3 women (2 of them pregnant) and 2 children between the ages of 8 and 12. They described their boat as a white rubber boat with a still working engine. They also reported to us that, for several hours, they had seen a Libyan military boat and three airplanes passing by that took photos of them without interacting with them further. They estimated their location was in international waters, but we could not receive a GPS location from them. After this the connection to the travelers broke off and we could never reestablish it. At that moment we noticed a tweet posted by Italy’s interior minister Salvini at 4:39pm which talked about two boats in the Central Mediterranean Sea carrying around 100 travelers each, stating they would be brought back to Libya by the Libyan authorities. The attached picture showed migrants on a white rubber boat. We thus suspect that the boat we had been in contact with could be one of those mentioned and photographed in this tweet. During the night and the next morning, we could not get through to the travelers anymore and closed the case, assuming that their interception was orchestrated through EU-Libyan collaboration.