Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 20th April 2021
Case name: 2021_04_20-CM405
Situation: Boat in distress in the Central Med; after 5 days of worrying Alarm Phone received confirmation that the travellers were brought to Tunisia.
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Central Mediterranean

Summary of the case: On Tuesday the 20th of April 2021 in the late evening we received a direct call from a boat in distress in the Central Mediterranean Sea. In the boat were around 42 travellers, including a woman and six children. The connection on the phone was very bad, but during several calls we managed to gather the following information about the boat. The travellers had left from Zuwara at around 09.00 CEST on a wooden boat and had run out of food and water. The woman on the boat was very ill and they had only one life vest among them. Further, their engine had stopped working. After explaining them how to find their GPS position on the satellite phone, they managed to pass on their position, showing that they were still in Libyan waters.
At 22.47 CEST we tried to reach the so-called Libyan coastguard on several different numbers, but were not able to establish contact. At 22.48 CEST we sent an email to all relevant authorities, alerting them to the distress of the travellers. At 23.41 CEST we alerted the public to the distress of the travellers in the following tweet. We continued trying to call the so-called Libyan coastguard, but only at 23.36 CEST did we reach an officer. He copied our information and told us that they would send a boat.
At 01.34 CEST the travellers called us again and stressed the urgency of their situation as water was entering their boat. We immediately forwarded this information to the authorities along with their updated position.
Online, we could monitor the credit of the travellers decreasing, indicating that they were also communicating with others. Our shift team was able to recharge their credit, allowing them to reach out for help. At 03.47 CEST we received an email from the so called Libyan coastguard stating that one of their vessels was about to reach the boat in distress. Half an hour later, we spoke to the travellers again, but the connection was too bad to understand much. Only at 08.45 did we manage to establish contact to the boat again and get an updated position from them which we forwarded to the authorities. After this, we never managed to reach the travellers again. We called the so-called Libyan coastguard several times, where different officers told us about travellers arriving back in Libya on their own and denying having received any information about these travellers from the Alarm Phone. We continued trying to find out what had happened to the travellers by trying to talk to authorities and relatives. The following morning at 07.45 CEST we called the Tunisian coastguard, but they told us that no boat matching our description had been rescued the previous day. However, they told us that they had vessels patrolling the area. Our communication with the so-called Libyan coastguard continued to be unstable as they mostly did not answer their phone, and when they did they were unable to give us any information.
Only on the 25th of April did we receive a confirmation that the travellers had been brought to Tunisia.