Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 9th of September 2020
Case name: 2020_09_09-AEG708
Situation: 9 people pushed back to Turkey near Chios
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Aegean Sea

Summary of the Case:
At 03:00 CEST we received a message from a relative about a group of 9 travelers. We were also given a position which was three hours old. The message said that the travelers had been pushed back from Greece to Turkey. We were given two contact numbers of the travelers. We made contact with the travelers and discovered that they were already in detention in Turkey. They had indeed been violently pushed back by the Greek coastguard.
Later, we were able to collect a testimony from one of the travelers, describing the events of the pushback: “The crazy thing was that when you heard from us on 9. September we had spent already 4 days at sea. It was 4 days before that the Greeks attacked us.
We were 8 boys and one girl most of us from Congo and Somalia, all Africans.
They took everything away from us, money, phones and everything.
They took us to their big boat and we slept 4 days on that big Greek ship. We were brought inside the ship and they kept us inside the whole time. They did not give us any food only water from time to time and they locked us inside. We stayed all together in one room inside the ship.
On the fourth day they put us onto a life-raft and left us at the sea. I don’t know why they kept us for so long before they did this.
I am stuck in Turkey since 2 years. It was not my first try to get out of Turkey, but all the many times before it was already the Turkish police on land or the Turkish coastguard at sea who stopped us. It was the first time that I managed to go till Greek waters. And this time it was Greek people to take us and to send us again. We are going to be crazy, the life as a black person here is too hard. We have to work for many hours and for money that we cannot survive with. We are stuck because we come too late, now that every way is closed for us.
If my testimony can help that maybe one day justice can come, then I will be very exited.“

We deplore this systematic abuse of human beings.