Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 17th of May 2020
Case name: 2020_05_17-CM246
Situation: 50 traveller fleeing Lybia, rescued by fishing vessel Tremar to Malta
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Central Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Cases:
The 17th of may 2020 at 00:07, a boat contacted us from central mediterranean sea. They say that they are 50 ppl in a small wooden boat. Water is entering. They are not moving. They dictate a position near Lampedusa and tell us that they called CG already and asked us to call the CG again. They fled Lybia from Zuwara and are on the water for 24 hours.

We tweet : Breaking! A boat with ~50 people fleeing from Libya just reached out to the Alarm Phone! They are in distress in the Italian #SAR zone and only a few miles from #Lampedusa. There is water entering the boat and the weather conditions are very dangerous. They need immediate rescue!

We reach the boat again at 00:45, they give us another position (35.02801, 12.21019) which is in Maltese SAR. They say that the battery is low.
After 00.45, we try to call the travelers every 30 minutes but had no contact to the boat anymore.
Several vessels in the vicinity were tracked, which stopped close to the last location of PoB, then continued North. We tried but were unable to reach the shipping company.

The next morning, we find out that according to a reporter, an unspecified fishing vessel allegedly rescued the ~50 people in distress, under the coordination of #Malta authorities who requested #Italy to disembark the people in the closest port in #Lampedusa.
When we try to learn more, authorities in Italy and Malta either don't pick up the phone, or are highly uncooperative when they do. The Italian and Maltese authorities pass the buck, one tells us to call the other and vice versa. They did not confirm the rescue, nor that they would be launching a rescue operation. They did not confirm any port of safety for the fishing vessel which might have rescued the boat.

We tweet : the Maltese-registered fishing vessel #Tremar rescued the boat

Through research we found out that the boat was rescued from the Maltese fishing boat Tremar. The migrants were then taken to one of the Captain Morgen boats off Malta where they were kept until 06.06.2020.