Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 2nd of August 2020

Case name: 2020_08_02-WM475

Situation: 11 people travelling from Algeria to Almería, 3 survivors, 1 dead, 7 missing

Place of incident: Western Mediterranean

Summary of the case:

At 3.40pm CEST on 2 August 2020 we received a call from the relative of someone on a boat that had left from Oran, Algeria at 9pm on 1 August. The boat was travelling towards Almería, Spain. He gave us his relative on that boat’s name and informed us that all the travellers on the boat were of Algerian nationality. Their phone had run out of battery and he had been unable to get in contact with them since the boat had departed. We attempted to call those on the boat on first being alerted to the distress and routinely over the following days but did not succeed in establishing any contact. We phoned Salvamento Marítimo at 4.18pm and passed them the information we had. They told us that many boats of 7 and 11 people had arrived (around 20) so they could not identify the one we were looking for, and redirected us to the Guardia Civil to try to find more specific information. The Guardia Civil also told us that they could not give us any information to help us identify whether the travellers we were looking for had reached safety or not. We continued trying to contact various authorities to try to find further information, but with no success.

At 12.11pm on 4 August the relative told us that he had been told that the boat with his brother had arrived and that the 11 travellers on the boat were in Almería hospital but had had no direct confirmation of this. We contacted the hospital and were informed that there was no one with his name there. The following day we tried and again were told the same.

We again tried to contact many different authorities to find news of this person, but continued to be told that there were too many arrivals for the authorities to be able to say if this particular person had arrived.

Later that afternoon we found the report of a shipwreck in the region with 11 people.

Several days later on 9 August we were contacted by the family of someone else who was supposed to be on the same boat as the person we were originally contacted about. The family told us that they had identified the body of their relative who was found drowned at sea.

On 11 August we got a further phone call from another relative looking for the first man we had been contacted about. He was still not on the list of arrivals to Spain and so is presumed one of those missing.

We later discovered that there were three survivors from this boat who were all taken to Almería hospital, one confirmed dead, and seven who remain missing, presumed dead.

Tweets:

2.45pm, 5 August - https://twitter.com/alarm_phone/status/1291007399613075456?s=20