Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 25th of August 2019

Case name: 2019_08_25-CM185
Situation: approx. 50 travelers (20 women, 4 children) in distress in the Central Mediterranean, probably intercepted by the so-called Libyan coast guard
Status of WTM Investigation: Unconfirmed
Place of Incident: Central Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case:

On Sunday, 25th of August at 5:30pm CEST the Alarm Phone received a distress call from a group of travelers who had started from Garabouli, Libya the night before. They said there were around 50 persons on board, among them 20 women and 4 children and their engine was broken, so they were only drifting. We tried to find out more details about their situation and their GPS location, but communication was hard due to a bad connection with continuous interruptions. When we managed to understand their location, we informed the Maltese coast guards via phone call and e-mail at 6:10pm and passed all information on to them. They informed us that they had a lot of cases at that moment and we agreed on calling them again in one hour. We could not re-establish the contact to the travelers. When we called back Malta at 8pm to ask for news they said they were to busy to talk to us. At 8:45pm we informed the Italian and Libyan authorities via e-mail and learned that the Italians were aware of the case and had put it in charge of the so-called Libyan coastguard. During the night and the next day, we continuously tried to get through to the people on the boat again but never re-established the contact and in the afternoon we decided to close the case, assuming that the travelers had been intercepted by the so-called Libyan coastguard.