Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 20th of February 2019
Case name: 2019_02_20-WM376
Situation: Alarm Phone alerted to a group of travellers in distress on their way from Nador. In the end they managed to get back to Morocco on their own
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Western Mediterranean Sea

Summary of the Case: On Wednesday the 20th of February at 1.33pm CET, the Alarm Phone shift team was alerted by a contact person to a group of 36 people, including nine women and a girl. The travellers had left the previous night at 1am from around Nador, and the last contact to the boat had been at around 8am. We tried to call the travellers, but were not able to reach them. At 2.05pm we called the Spanish search and rescue organisation Salvamento Maritimo (SM), and passed on the information we had. 20 minutes later they informed us that they were looking for the travellers, but hadn’t been able to localize them yet. Throughout the day we continued trying to reach the travellers, and stayed in contact with both the contact person and SM. Online we could follow the attempts from rescue vessels and a search and rescue aircraft to localize the boat. At 1.58am the contact person forwarded us a position of the travellers. We passed it on to SM, who informed us that they had handed over the operation to the Moroccan rescue authorities, and after this point they were not willing to give us any more information about the progress of the rescue operation. At 9.35am the contact person informed us that the travellers had arrived safely back to Morocco at around 5am, brought back to shore by the waves. SM confirmed this shortly after, and told us that a local fisherman had helped them reach the shore.