Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 5th of September 2018

Case name: 2018_09_05-WM324
Situation: 2 boats from Nador, one intercepted, 6 people died, one rescued to Spain, 6 dead
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Western Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case:

On Wednesday, 5th of September, the Alarm Phone was alerted to two boats that had left from Nador towards Spain. One boat was eventually rescued by Spain, already sinking, and 6 people died, one woman and 5 men. The other boat was intercepted by the Moroccan Marine Royale and 6 men died on the journey.

Case 1: At 12:44am CEST we were alerted to a boat in distress coming from Nador, Morocco, with 57 people on board (among them 18 women and 2 children). They had left from Nador at 1:10am CEST. The last contact to the boat was at 9am in the morning. We reached the boat at 1:07pm but couldn’t get further information due to connection problems. At 1:09am we called Salvamento Marítimo Almería, but couldn’t reach the authority. We then called the center in Madrid. They informed us that the search of the boat would be ongoing. On the livemap vesselfinder.com we observed two naval assets of Salvamento and an helicopter in the area. We couldn’t establish a connection to the boat anymore. The contact person passed us other numbers of the travellers on board, but none was reachable. At 5:47pm we called SM Madrid again, but they hadn’t found the boat yet. They confirmed that they would still continue to search. At 7:55pm the SAR operation was still ongoing. At 9:07pm SM Madrid informed us that they had found a boat with 57 people, among them five dead bodies and one person was missing. During the next day, we tried to confirm that this was the boat we had been searching for. Only another day later, our contact person confirmed that the boat had been rescued, but 5 men and one woman had died.


Case 2: At 9:49pm CEST we were alerted to a second boat that had left from Nador at 5am CEST, carrying 58 people. We didn’t manage to establish a direct connection to the travellers. At 11:26pm we called the Spanish rescue authority Salvamento Marítimo in Almería and Algeciras. We also sent an email to the respective authorities with all information on the boat to document the alert. During the next day, we tried to find out whether the boat had been rescued by Salvamento. Unfortunately our contact person informed us the following day that the boat had been intercepted by the Moroccan Marine Royale and 6 people had died.