Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 27 of August 2022

Case name: 2022_08_27_Eastern Med_982

Situation: 50 travellers who left from Akkar (north Lebanon) towards Italy, in distress near Rhodes and pushed back to Turkey by HCG, probably deported to Syria

Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded

Place of Incident: Aegean/EM

Summary of the Case:

Early on August the 27th, Alarm Phone was called by a relative about a boat that had departed the day before around 2 am from Akkar, North Lebanon, towards Italy. The 50 people on the boat – men, women and children from Syria -, were unreachable since 2 pm on the 26th. On the 29th afternoon, we were finally able to communicate with the people on the boat, while they were approaching Greek coasts near Rhodes: the boat was damaged and they had to take water out of it for 2 days already. We informed the Greek authorities of the distress and its location, but then lost contact with the boat again. On the next morning, while relatives informed us that Greek coast guards had taken the people somewhere they didn’t know, the Hellenic Coast Guards pretended not to know about the incident. We contacted the Turkish Coast Guards, who informed us that they had rescued the boat in the morning. Later, relatives told us that the people were mistreated and stripped of money in Greece before being pushed back to Turkey, which they confirmed when we could talk to them again directly. After 4 days of detention, they told us that they were transferred to a camp in Kahramanmaraş, Turkey, and forced to sign deportation papers to Syria. We tried to activate local legal support, but the circumstances probably prevented any intervention. According to a lawyer, such unlawful deportations from the camps of this area were a new development. The last time we talked to them, on September the 11th, they said they would be deported the next morning. We could not reach the group after that any more.

https://twitter.com/alarm_phone/status/1564492196283387904