Nine Egyptians who could be charged with murder over the latest mass shipwreck in the Ionian Sea are in custody in Greece. On Monday they will testify before a judge, which could help to clarify the structure of one of the criminal organizations that have turned the central Mediterranean into a graveyard, with the scrapped Libya as the main springboard for irregular immigration.
At the moment the captain has not appeared and even the nationality of those who pocketed around three million euros for sending hundreds of their peers adrift is unknown. Among them, a minimum of twenty women and children – up to a hundred, according to other sources – who would have perished without exception, having been locked in the hold, to get them away from a congested deck.
The unscrupulous first filled the fishing shell to overflowing with more than half a thousand passengers, with a rate of 4,000 to 6,000 euros, more typical of a pleasure cruise. Her Way of the Cross began Saturday morning in Tobruk, Libya – even though the ship had arrived from Egypt – and ended abruptly early Wednesday morning, with almost no food or water and still halfway to Italy.
When things turned sour, smugglers and crew pounced on the dinghies, leaving customers to fend for themselves, and of course, without anything resembling a life jacket. This is how one of the 104 survivors remembers him, who knew how to swim saved his life.
Another affected, a Syrian, yesterday attributed the shipwreck to the sudden movement of the passengers to get the food that, with the best intentions, was offered by a relief ship. The crowded ship listed and capsized.
This has not prevented criticism of the Greek authorities, who did not know or were unable to prevent the catastrophe, despite Frontex monitoring the trajectory of the ship since midday and a Greek coastal patrol closely following it for several hours.
Greek sources say that before midnight they came to throw a rope to the fishing boat, to tow it to the coast, but that elements on board rebelled and came to cut it. “No help, go Italy”, they would have shouted, in macaronic English (“Help no, let's go to Italy”).
Along the way, some desperate calls to entities that from Europe work to promote the rescues.
Given the dimension of the drama, with few precedents in Greece, with 78 rescued corpses – only one of which belongs to a woman – and at least three hundred more at the bottom of the sea, on Thursday there were protest demonstrations in some Greek cities. From UN organizations it has also been criticized that Athens –currently with a provisional government– did not succeed in coordinating a rescue action on time.
Illegal immigration has avoided Greece lately, due to the greater control in the refugee camps and the increase in deportations and knowing the greater difficulties, in any case, to reach the heart of Europe through the Balkans. Something that has led to the establishment of increasingly long and dangerous routes, although with larger ships, to try to reach the Italian continental coast in dramatic situations. From eastern Libya – instead of the closer west – or Lebanon.
Many of the survivors of the shipwreck, who were trying to enter the European Union illegally, were being taken this morning by buses from Kalamata to the Malakassa detention camp, near Athens. The Hellenic government assures that the asylum applications that are submitted will be examined and that those who do not meet the requirements –predictably the vast majority, since there is no war in Egypt or Pakistan and the weapons have fallen silent in Libya or Syria– will be deported.
The overloading of the shells is not pure greed, but the result of a perverse calculation that takes into account the humanitarian response of the other party. In fact, the Greek authorities estimate that the operation in question had been brewing "between 40 and 50 days." Whether they arrive in the European Union or are deported or end up at the bottom of the sea, they all paid in advance. Many of them, after contacting through social networks.
The nine arrested Egyptians, all between the ages of 20 and 40, have been charged by the Kalamata prosecutor with forming a criminal organization dedicated to smuggling irregular migrants, causing a shipwreck and knowingly endangering lives.
It should be added that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jeremy Laurence, stressed this Friday "the need to investigate people smugglers and human traffickers to ensure that they are brought to justice." On the other hand, Laurence has called on states to "open more legal migration pathways" and to improve "shared responsibility" in the "safe and timely disembarkation of rescues."
