The Greek press yesterday insisted on two horrifying figures about the shipwreck at dawn on Wednesday off the Peloponnese peninsula: that some 750 people were traveling in the sunken fishing boat full of immigrants and that a hundred were minors. These data arise from the images taken by the Greek coast guard before the sinking, from the account of some of the 104 survivors – all men and the majority Syrian and Egyptian, including six minors – and from the statements of an activist who contacted the immigrants. before the shipwreck. Until yesterday, only 78 bodies had been found.
Last night, the AFP agency and the ERT television channel reported that the Greek police arrested nine Egyptians – supposedly including the captain of the boat – accused of being the traffickers and who would be among those rescued.
Manolis Makaris, head of Cardiology at the Kalamata Hospital – the city closest to the shipwreck – who treated many of the survivors, told the Ta Nea newspaper that he received an avalanche of calls from relatives of the migrants, many of whom sent him photos of children who were supposedly on board to find out if they were alive.
“I received a lot of phone calls and photos (from Syria and Egypt) sent to me by relatives of the disappeared hoping to find out if they were alive. I learned that many were from the same town. In the messages they asked me if I had seen those children," Makaris said. "(The survivors) told me there were 750 people on board," he added. “The first thing they wanted was to talk to their loved ones; It was an emotionally charged moment,” Makaris said. The doctor also told the ERT chain that a survivor explained to him that he had seen "one hundred children in the hold" of the ship, where the women were also apparently traveling.
The old fishing boat sunk in the Ionian Sea, 30 meters long, initially set sail empty from an Egyptian port and made a stopover in the Libyan city of Tobruk, where the migrants boarded, who sailed for five days. Rescue teams were still looking for survivors yesterday, including Pakistani and Palestinian citizens.
Public opinion and the media in Greece wonder how it is possible that a Greek coast guard, alerted by Frontex, the EU border service, approached the fishing boat overloaded with migrants in international waters and did nothing for helping its occupants, who soon after would end up drowning.
The Greek government – which decreed three days of mourning – assures that the migrants refused the help of the coast guard because they wanted to reach Italy. However, the Italian activist of Moroccan origin, Nawal Soufi, denies this and assures that she had been speaking on the phone with the ship's passengers for some time, who told her that the captain had abandoned them on the high seas and that "they definitely needed help wherever they were." they found”. However, the information that she pointed out last night to the arrest of the captain would contradict these statements.
In any case, the Supreme Court of Greece ordered the opening of an investigation to clarify who is responsible for the death of these hundreds of migrants. For years, Greek and international NGOs have been accusing the Athens government of forcibly returning immigrants seeking asylum.
On the other hand, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) described the shipwreck in the Ionian Sea as "one of the most devastating tragedies in the Mediterranean in a decade." Although it did not give a number, the organization spoke of "hundreds of more people" drowned.
