Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 24th June 2021
Case name: 2021_06_24-CM481
Situation: Alarm Phone alerted to 27 travellers drifting in Italian waters. We were never able to establish if they arrived by themselves or were rescued by the Italian coastguard.
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Central Mediterranean

Summary of the case:
On Thursday the 24th of June 2021, the Alarm Phone shift team was called directly by a group of 27 travellers, all men, who were adrift in Italian waters, as they had run out of petrol. They sent us their GPS position showing that they were not far from Sicily. At 14.28 CEST we sent an email to all relevant authorities, alerting them to the drifting boat and forwarding all the information we had. At 15.45 CEST we called the Italian coastguard who did not want to give us any information about ongoing search and rescue efforts. 20 minutes later we spoke to the travellers again. They told us that they had also spoken to the Italian coastguard, but that the Italian coastguard had also refused to tell the travellers whether they were planning to rescue them. Throughout the evening we stayed in contact with the travellers and forwarded their updated GPS position to the Italian coastguard as often as possible. However, in the night we lost contact to the boat. We were never able to find out what happened to the travellers as they never replied to our last messages and as the Italian coastguard was not willing to share any information about rescues with us. We hope very much that they managed to reach Italy by themselves and that they have arrived safely.