b>Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 18th of April 2016

Case name: 2016_04_18-AEG250
Situation: 20 travellers stranded on Farmakonisi, one distress case near Kos, all rescued
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Aegean Sea

Summary of the Case: On Monday, the 18th of April 2016, the Alarm Phone was alerted to 2 distress cases in the Aegean Sea: in one case, twenty travellers had stranded on the Greek island of Farmakonisi. The Leros Port Authorities picked them up and they were transferred to a camp on Leros. In the second case, a boat had run out of fuel on the way to Kos. They were picked up by the Greek Coastguard.

At 7:02am, we received a WhatsApp message with two contact numbers. We called and talked to a group of travellers stranded on Farmakonisi. They were 20 persons including 7 children.
At 7:40am, we informed the Leros Port Authority about the group. One hour later, we sent an e-mail about the case to the Greek Coastguard, the UNHCR and a solidarity group on Leros. We also sent a message to the stranded travellers, but they did not read the message. At 2.30pm after several failed attempts, we finally reached the group, but the connection was very bad. Throughout the afternoon and evening, we tried to get in touch through messages and the calling, but no communication was possible. At 6:04pm, we called the Port Authorities again. The officer on duty told us that 23 persons had been transferred from Farmakonisi to Leros and that to her knowledge these had been all people stuck on the island. The next day, we tried to get in touch with the people who had been stuck on Farmakonisi. On Tuesday evening, they finally answered saying that they were not on Farmakonisi anymore, but in a camp.


At 10:51pm, we received another alert via WhatsApp: a group of travellers had run out of fuel on their way to the Greek island of Kos. We immediately reached out to the travellers and they explained that they were 5 men, 8 women and children and that they were travelling on a 4meter long wooden boat. The person who had first contacted us about the case had already informed the Greek Coastguard, but we nevertheless called the Coastguard to be sure. Two other contact persons contacted us about the same case. In fact, we were not a hundred per cent sure, whether the alerts regarded the same case, as the coordinates given matched, but we had different information regarding the number of people. On the phone we had understood that they were 13 persons, but other contact persons talked about 20 and up to 50 persons. At 11:24 one of our contacts confirmed that the boat (with 50 persons) had been rescued. A couple of minutes later, a second contact person told us that the boat the Greek Coastguard had rescued the boat. We tried to reach the travellers to find out whether, by whom and to where they had been rescued. On Tuesday evening, we finally received a message from the travellers, saying that they were in jail, but not whether in Greece or in Turkey. The Port Authority of Kos told us that the Greek Coastguard had rescued one boat on Monday night with 21 persons on board.