Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 9thth of August 2021

Case name: 20210809-AEG804*

Situation: 25 travellers violently pushed back from Greece to Turkey

Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded

Place of Incident: Aegean Sea

Summary of the Case:

On the 9th of August at 10 CEST we were informed about a group that was pushed back from Mytilini to Izmir. At 10:30 CEST we established contact to the people who had already been pushed back when we talked and expressed their despair about the violence they faced from the Greek Coastguards. On the 10th of September one of the people reached out to us again and testified:

„The Greek Coast Guard stopped us at the Sea. We were a group of 25 people with women among us, some of them pregnant, and 5 children. They dragged our boat to the land. And then they put us in the bush. They have a building there, but its in the bush so nobody can see you. They took us from the boat and took everything from us: our phones, our money, even our bags and clothes. They did not give us food or water. They hit me, they hit other people and they also hit the women. They handcuffed our hands and feet, even the ones of the pregnant women. This building was like a prison, there was a Greek flag. The Greek police was there all the time, they all had the same uniform. There were two more groups of people that the Greek police locked in there together with our group. We were with the Greek police in this building for 3 days. After that around 2 am midnight they took us and another group of 30 people with their ship and then pushed us in their rafts in the middle of the Sea in the dark. The Greek Coast Guard left us there. We did not have phones anymore we had nothing, so we were shouting and finally some people heard us and called the Turkish Coast Guard. The Turkish Coast Guard rescued us hours later. Some of us were heavily injured because of the violence we faced from the Greeks.“