Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 16 December 2023
Case name: 2023_12_16 - Eastern Med AP2374
Situation: 85 people went missing after departing from Lebanon towards Cyprus.
Status of WTM Investigation: closed
Place of Incident: Eastern Med
Location: no location
Summary of the Case:

On the evening of December 16, the Alarm Phone hotline was alerted by relatives to a missing boat at sea between Lebanon and Cyprus. The white fiberglass boat had departed from Lebanon 5 days earlier, on December 11, with 85 people on board, among which 35 children. The relatives had lost contact with them since Tuesday, December 12, evening. They shared with us some of their names. The next morning, on December 17, after trying to reach the people on the boat without success, Alarm Phone alerted JRCC Larnaca as well as Cyprus port and marine police by phone and e-mail, which told us that they had rescued on Friday a boat with 84/85 people, and that we should call back on Monday, December 18th to get more information. We forwarded the alert to the Occupied Turkish Territory of Northern Cyprus, the UK military base on Cyprus, the Turkish Coastguards in Ankara and the Greek Coastguards in Piraeus. The alert was also sent to the Cypriot human rights organization KISA, which started to investigate.
On December 18, Alarm Phone was told that the 84/85 people were in Pournara camp, information that families asked us to verify. On December 19, KISA got informed by the officer of Asylum Service at Pournara camp that none of the missing people whose names were shared by the families were actually in the camp. We thus extended the research and called the Lebanese Navy Forces as well as the Lebanese Red Cross on December 19. We also informed the Cedar Center for Legal Studies in Lebanon, which got in contact with the families of the disappeared and started to investigate their fate as well. The same day, the Alarm Phone also released a Tweet to make the case public. In the evening, relatives informed Alarm Phone that family members based in Cyprus were told by authorities that the people were detained in a deportation unit of the Kofinou camp. They were scared that people could have been already deported to Lebanon. On December 21, the UNHCR in Cyprus started to investigate in the camps, in detention centers and by contacting the police, without finding the people. They passed on the information to the UNHCR offices in Lebanon, Turkey and Greece.
Since that day, the families of the disappeared, KISA, Cedar Center for Legal Studies and Alarm Phone are trying to find out information about the whereabouts of the 85 persons. We demand the authorities to support the investigations and to give answers to the families.

Tweet : https://twitter.com/alarm_phone/status/1742586205345038351