Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 18th of July 2016

Case name: 2016_07_18-CM70
Situation: Alarm Phone alerted to several boats in distress in the Central Mediterranean Sea
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Central Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Cases: On Monday the 18th of July, the WatchTheMed Alarm Phone was alerted to what presumably were several vessels in distress off the coast of Libya. Our shift team received a call at 5.06am from a contact person with an Algerian phone number, alerting us to what seemed at first a single boat that had left two hours earlier from Tripoli/Libya, carrying hundreds of passengers, including relatives of his. We were unable to get in direct contact with the boat and we also could not obtain their exact GPS coordinates. However, after finding out that they had reached international waters, we called the Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre (MRCC) in Rome at 7.16am and passed the relevant information on to them. The exact number of people on board remained unclear and it seemed much more likely that there were not merely one but, in fact, several migrant boats in distress that had collectively left the Libyan shores. In the following hours, humanitarian rescue vessels of MOAS and MSF announced several rescue operations off the coast of Libya. Throughout, MRCC Rome communicated openly with us, informing us about different SAR operations, including an “air asset” that had been sent to the area in question. In the early afternoon we finally found out through our initial contact person that the boats had been found and the travellers been rescued. According to the Italian Coastguard, about 451 persons in 6 boats were rescued throughout the day.