Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 3rd of October 2017

Case name: 2017_10_03-AEG309
Situation: 9 travellers east of Lesvos turned back to Turkey
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Aegean Sea

Summary of the Case: On Tuesday, the 3rd of October 2017, at 7:14am, a contact person alerted us to a boat in the Aegean Sea, East of the Greek island of Lesvos, carrying 9 travellers, among them 5 children. At 7:23am and 7:27am, we received new positions via a contact person; they showed that the boat was moving towards the island and was already in Greek waters. The contact person had lost contact with the people on the boat, and we also could not establish direct contact. In the next hours, we reached out to local organizations on Lesvos to ask whether they had any information concerning the boat. At 3:52pm, we called the Coast Guard in Mytilene. The officer in charge said that they had been looking for a boat, which could possibly be the one we were asking about. As they had not encountered the boat, he assumed that the Turkish Coast Guard had picked it up. At 4:07pm we called the Turkish Coast Guard, but we were denied any information on their operations. At 4:48pm, the contact person informed us that for unknown reasons the boat had turned back to Turkey. We tried to find out more, because the position we had received was clearly in Greek water. But as we have been never able to establish a direct contact to the travellers, we could not finally figure out what was exactly happening on that day.