Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 17th of March 2016

Case name: 2016_03_17-AEG235
Situation: Alarm Phone alerted to 1 emergency situation in the Aegean Sea
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Aegean Sea

Summary of the Cases: On Thursday the 17th of March 2016, at 10.20pm, our shift team was alerted by activist Nawal Soufi to a vessel in distress. She forwarded coordinates of a vessel that was on its way to Chios but still in Turkish waters, as well as a phone number of passengers on that vessel. We immediately reached out to the boat-people but could not reach them. We then tried to contact them via WhatsApp which was also not possible. Due to the limited information we tried to retrieve more details from Nawal but she was unable to send us any further information. Since we did not know whether or not the GPS coordinates were accurate and since we could not reach the travellers, we did not notify the coastguards. Coastguards of both Greece and Turkey have repeatedly informed us that they would only launch rescue operations if the information/coordinates could be verified. Often, GPS positions that are passed on through social media are outdated and thus misleading for authorities. Since we could not reach Nawal again, we asked her activist colleagues to find out more about the distress situation. However, more information could not be obtained and so the only option our shift teams had was to repeatedly try to contact the travellers. At 11.52pm the activist group United Rescue informed us about a boat that was said to have capsized near Chios. The coordinates they had differed so that it is hard to tell whether this was the same boat in question. Shortly after midnight they told us that the boat they had heard about had safely reached Chios. At 00.33am, we finally heard back from the boat-people. They wrote ‘thank god’ and later ‘I’m fine’. We asked whether they had all reached the island safely but we did not receive a response. We tried to call the number but it was not reachable. Then, at 00.45am, someone from the Nawal activist group informed us that the boat was safe. At 00.48am we again received WhatsApp messages from the boat-people, suggesting that they were fine.