Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 23rd January 2021

Case name: 20210123-CM350

Situation: Alarm Phone alerted by fishermen to around 55 travellers in distress in the Central Med, their fate remains unclear.

Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded

Place of Incident: Central Mediterranean

Summary In the night of Saturday the 23rd of January, the Alarm Phone shift team received a message from a fisherman who alerted us to a boat of 55 travellers in distress on a rubber boat. The fisherman had spotted the boat at around 11.30h CET on the 22nd, where the travellers had been around 50 km north of Al Khoms. We were not able to obtain sufficient information about the boat or establish direct contact, but in the morning at 09.23h CET we sent an email to all relevant authorities with the information we had. During the day we tried to find more information about the travellers and their whereabouts, but we did not succeed in this. In the evening, at 18.28h CET and again at 20.40h CET we called the Italian coastguard, but they were not willing to give us any information about ongoing search and rescue efforts. The following day we kept trying to contact the fishermen who had alerted us to the boat, but we did not manage to reach them. On the 25th and 26th of January we contacted the so-called Libyan coastguard several times asking for news about the travellers, but they told us that they had not intercepted any boats matching our description. As we still did not have sufficient information about the travellers, we were forced to close the case without knowing what happened to the travellers. We hope that they somehow made it back to Libya safely on their own and that they have not become some of the many invisible victims of the violent European border regime.