Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations –28 October 2020
Case name: 2020_10_28-WM513
Situation: Two boats, one carrying 30 travellers and the other 12, rescued to Spain.
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Western Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case: In the afternoon of Wednesday the 28th of October the Alarm Phone was alerted by a relative of one of the travellers to a boat in distress that had departed from near Nador in the early morning. The boat was carrying 30 travellers, reportedly it was near Almeria but they were out of fuel. Soon after, another worried relative of a traveller informed us about a boat in distress with the same number of people on board and which had departed at the same time and from the same place of the boat we had just been alerted to, we therefore assumed that this was the same case. After failing to reach both numbers of the travellers, at 17h20 we called the Spanish Search and Rescue organisation Salvamento Marítimo (SM) to inform about the case. The officer told us that they had just rescued a boat in front of Almeria carrying 30 people, we were therefore asked to find out some of the names of the travellers on board so that they could be compared with the people rescued. The relatives with which we were in contact gave us two names which we passed on to SM. Soon after one of the relatives informed us that their dear ones had been rescued to Spain and had called saying they were safe on land. At 19h35 however, SM called us back and told us that the boat they had rescued was not the one we had alerted them too, “our” boat was still at sea and they were searching for it. At this point we suspect that we might be dealing with two different cases. Later in the evening the relative of the travellers which supposedly was on the boat still at sea, called us to inform that the boat had been rescued earlier and was finally only carrying 12 travellers. Finally, another third boat still at sea with obviously 27 people was not an Alarm Phone case.