Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 5th of January 2016

Case name: 2016_01_05-AEG177
Situation: Alarm Phone alerted to boats in distress near Lesvos, at least
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Aegean Sea

Summary of the Cases: In the night from Monday to Tuesday the 5th of January 2016, around midnight, the Alarm Phone was alerted to one or two boats in distress in the Aegean Sea. Six different contact persons and solidarity groups like United Rescue and Nawal Soufi's activist collective informed us via WhatsApp about a boat in urgent distress on the way to Lesvos, but still in Turkish waters and we received several GPS coordinates. We immediately reached out to both the Turkish and the Greek Coastguards. The Greek Coastguard referred us to the Turkish coastguard, because the positions were in Turkish waters. We also called the three contact numbers of travellers on the boat(s) and were successful in one case. The person we talked to confirmed that they were in urgent distress, facing extremely high waves. At 1am the Turkish coastguard told us that they were looking for the boat(s). At 1.30am, when we checked with them again, they explained that the weather conditions were rough, but that they continued the search and rescue operation. Other groups, who were also involved in the case, had quite a different experience with the Turkish Coast Guard. They tols us, they had the impression that the Turkish Coastguard was not really cooperating.
At 2am we received the news from two of the contact persons that the Turkish coastguard had rescued the travellers. However, one solidarity group involved in the case, Nawal Soufi's activist collective told us at 2.47am that a boat had capsized and that about 18 persons including many children had died. We tried to reach out to the travellers again, to get the rescue confirmed, but without success. None of the other contact persons had heard about the shipwreck. Only later through a follow-up research we learned that from one boat, several passenger had drowned during the night, while other had been rescued by the Turkish Coast Guard and had been brought to Turkey.
On Tuesday morning and throughout the day, we called the Turkish coastguard to inquire about the rescue operations and the deaths. They told us that they had carried out several rescue operations during the night and in the morning. At 8am local time, they had rescued 12 persons, but several others had died.
Around noon on Tuesday, the media started to report about two shipwrecks and many deaths. According to several sources, 34 or 36 bodies washed ashore at the Aegean Coast, in the district of Ayvalık and the district of Dikili. The media reports did not mention the boat that had capsized during the night, but referred to one or two boats that had left Turkey in direction of Lesvos on early Tuesday morning and that had capsized a few hours later. The media also stated that 12 persons were rescued by the Turkish coastguard from the sea and the rocks near Ayvalık and that the survivors, who were suffering from hypothermia, were brought to a hospital.
In a press conference on Wednesday, the 6th of January a spokesperson of the Turkish government party AKP blamed Greece for the most recent tragedy, claiming that a boat with 55 travellers had capsized after a refoulement through the Greek naval authorities. The Hellenic Coast Guard rejected this claim in an official statement, published the same day. Solidarity groups in Turkey and Greece, however, underlined that the Turkish Coastguard had reacted too late to the alerts sent by Turkish citizens and other solidarity groups.