Watch The Med Alarm Phone Investigations – 26th of September 2015

Case name: 2015_09_26-AEG82
Situation: 3 distress cases in the Aegean Sea, near Lesvos, and Agathonisi
Status of WTM Investigation: Concluded
Place of Incident: Aegean Sea

Summary of the Cases: On Saturday the 26th of September 2015, the Alarm Phone was alerted to 8 boats in the Aegean Sea, near the Greek islands of Lesvos and Agathonisi, 4 cases turned out to be cases of distress.

At 4am, the alarm phone was contacted about a 1st distress case of a vessel carrying 60 persons on the way from Turkey to Southern Lesvos. The contact person had also not been in direct contact with the travellers, but had the information that the boat was in danger of capsizing and asked us to alarm the Greek coastguard. We thus contacted the Greek coastguard and also sent a message to the travellers, asking them to call 112 as well. We tried several times to call them too, but could not reach them.
At 8:24 the Greek coastguard confirmed that they had rescued a boat in the position that we had passed on, but they could not know whether it was the same boat, as the phone of the travellers had stayed switched off.

Half an hour after the first call, the shift team received a 2nd call from the same contact person about 35 travellers, who had stranded on Agathonisi. We checked the position and found that the travellers were actually in the village. Despite the lack of support structures in Agathonisi, the people would certainly be seen and attended to at first daylight, so we did not intervene.

At 1.30 pm, we received a WhatsApp message from Nawal Soufi's activist collective with coordinates of a 3rd vessel near Northern Lesvos, but without any information about their situation. We could not reach them, but decided nevertheless to pass on their coordinates to the Greek coastguard. At 3.45pm we sent a WhatsApp message to the travellers, asking them whether the coastguard had picked them up and whether they were in need of help. A few minutes later, they answered that they were ok and not in need of anything. They did not say, whether the coastguard had picked them up and whether they had safely arrived in Greece, but as they did not seem to be in a situation of distress (anymore), we considered the case closed.

At 1.45pm, a few minutes after the third distress call, we received a call from a Macedonian Solidarity group about a 4th vessel in the Aegean, very close to the third, in the north of Lesvos. Our contact person asked us to check whether this boat was in safety. We called the Greek coastguard and sent an e-mail with the coordinates also to the UNHCR. At 4pm, we reached the Macedonian solidarity group, who told us that they were in contact with another boat close by and that the travellers on this boat had seen the Greek coastguard rescue the fourth vessel. We tried to reach the travellers who had witnessed the rescue ourselves, but they did not answer, thus we could not get a direct final confirmation of the rescue.

Next to these three cases of distress, the Alarm Phone received four calls about travellers, who either made it by themselves, were rescued by the coastguard without our intervention, or were in no distress situation at all. Three of these cases concerned vessels near Lesvos. One case was about a young Syrian man in a vessel near Farmakonisi, who was frightened, but not in a situation of distress.