Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 25th of October 2022

Case name: 2022_10_25_Eastern Med_1041

Situation: 67 people pushed back from south of Crete to Turkish waters

Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded

Place of Incident: Eastern Med / Aegean Sea

Summary of the Case:

On the 25th of October 2022, we were alerted by relatives to a boat in distress south of Crete. The boat was close to sinking. We did not manage to establish direct contact with the boat. We alerted the Greek coastguard at 9:36 CEST.

At 10:28 CEST, we also tweeted: “~ 65 people in distress near #Crete. We were informed about a boat carrying 65 people that is at risk of sinking South of #Crete. We informed @HCoastGuard about the situation - a rescue mission needs to be launched immediately.”

We were not able to get in touch with the people on board the boat all day, and the relatives had also lost contact with the group. At 22.15 CEST, the Greek coastguard stated in a phone call that they searched for the boat but did not find it and had stopped the search.

Days later, we learned from the relatives that the people had been pushed back to Turkish waters. We assume it is the group of 67 people the Turkish coastguard found off the coast of Izmirs Menderes district on the 26th of October at 9:40am local time, nearly all of them from Afghanistan. They were found on 3 different life-rafts and brought back to Turkey.

Relatives explained to us later that the people had been brought to a detention center in Turkey and those without documents from Turkey would be in danger of deportation to Afghanistan. We could not get into a direct contact with those in detention. The brother of the person who called us had managed to reach Europe on a second attempt, but did not want to speak about what he went through.

Twitter:
https://twitter.com/alarm_phone/status/1584824399064338433