Seconds before he plunged into the sea, Kamal, a 27-year-old Syrian refugee, glanced at his watch. It was 2.05 on June 14. His body sank into darkness along with about 750 people traveling with him aboard an old blue fishing boat that intended to reach Italy. "The Coast Guard towed us at high speed and we capsized," he says. The water, until that moment calm, was then filled with people desperately trying to save themselves, with screams, with men tearing off their clothes to escape from those who grabbed them to stay afloat ... A short distance away, the Greek coast guard vessel witnessed the scene. When the young man looked at his wrist again, already aboard the superyacht that came to his aid, it was 4.15. "I spent more than two hours swimming," he recalls.
The testimony of Kamal, one of the survivors of the tragic shipwreck that occurred three weeks ago in the Ionian Sea, less than 80 kilometers from the Greek coast, contradicts the version of the Greek authorities. But Kamal is not alone. A joint investigation by EL PAÍS with Lighthouse Reports, Reporters United, Monitor, SIRAJ and Der Spiegelhas interviewed 17 witnesses separately and 16 defend the same version: when the engine of the fishing boat stopped working, a Coast Guard boat towed them with a rope at high speed. The fishing boat capsized. Some believe the Coast Guard's ill-fated action was an accident, others believe it was intentional. Two survivors claim that they recorded the trailer sequence with their mobiles, but denounce that the Greek coastguard confiscated the devices. All of them ask to change their names for fear of reprisals.
Aerial image of the fishing vessel Adriana taken by the Frontex Eagle 1 aircraft on June 13 in the Greek SAR zone.
The boat, which had left Libya five days earlier, was carrying some 750 overcrowded people: Syrian, Afghan, Egyptian and Pakistani refugees. Men and women – several pregnant – but also teenagers and children who were trapped in the hold of the boat with no possibility of saving themselves. Only 82 bodies have been recovered. For the presumed number of victims, surely more than 600, this is already the second worst shipwreck in the Mediterranean, after April 2015, which left 1,100 dead.
For those who survived, the difference between life and death was a matter of 100 or 200 euros, which the traffickers demanded from those who asked to travel on the deck and not in the hold, a floating trap from which there was no way out.
The Greek government, which denies any responsibility, still does not answer a key question: How is it possible that hundreds of people drowned despite the fact that its coastguard was near the fishing boat for hours? On the table there are serious accusations: Did the Coast Guard have responsibility in the sinking of the boat?, Did it delay its rescue even with people drowning?, Did it intend to prevent at all costs that hundreds of migrants disembarked in its territory?.
Until today, there is no definitive evidence to refute the Greek version, but there are more and more elements to cast doubt on it. The only open judicial proceeding will try nine alleged Egyptian traffickers on board.
EL PAIS's joint investigation with Lighthouse Reports and its partnersprovides new data that reinforces the accusations against the Greek authorities. The investigation reveals the hardships of a trip in which passengers had to drink urine and seawater, the modus operandi of the mafias and, above all, sheds light on the performance of the Coast Guard. Internal reports from Frontex, which flew over the area with a plane and a drone, the documents contained in the court case and the 17 interviews with protagonists of the tragedy suggest that the rescue of that crowded and exhausted crowd was never a priority for the Greek authorities.
In addition, analysis of the statements that the coast guard took from nine survivors a few hours after disembarking suggests that some of the testimonies have been copied and pasted identically into the files, an indication of a possible manipulation of the facts.
The survivors aboard the 'Mayan Queen IV', in the port of Kalamata (Greece), on June 14. EUROKINISSI (via REUTERS)
A luxury yacht to the rescue
The reluctance of the authorities to activate a rescue operation, as already happened in the shipwreck off the Italian coast of Cutro in February, is one of the keys to this case. The Greek Coast Guard only activated the aid of the fishing boat more than 14 hours after the maritime coordination centers of Greece and Italy located it sailing in precarious conditions. They did it when the fishing boat, baptized as Adriana, was already sinking.
Before the sinking, Frontex, a spokeswoman confirms, provided air support to the Greek authorities. "But we didn't get a response," he says. They did respond to the offer to deploy a drone, but directed it towards another ship, off the island of Crete, in which "80 people were in immediate danger". When he returned, the rescue was already underway.
In the device coordinated by the Greeks, the role of a luxury yacht of 93 meters in length, the Mayan Queen IV, was crucial, which took down its lifeboat and collaborated in the search for survivors. The testimony of its captain Richard Kirkby to the Greek authorities, to which this investigation has had access, reveals that he received the notice of the shipwreck at 2.30 and that he was the first commercial ship to arrive in the area at 2.55. If the time is accurate (the captain of an oil tanker who also participated in the search claims to have received it at 2.12), the alert would have been issued almost half an hour after the sinking.
The captain stated that his crew pulled 15 castaways from the sea guided by cries for help. Later, eight huge ships participated in the search for people with little success. When they arrived, the sea had swallowed everything, it seemed that nothing had happened there.
At six o'clock in the morning, the British captain was ordered by radio to pick up those waiting on the Coast Guard ship and take them to port. Once the transfer was made, a hundred people and four coast guards headed for Kalamata, four hours away. Asked if he wanted to add anything else to his statement, Kirkby nodded: "Yes, I would like to say that in addition to the 10-15 people we rescued, my crew informed me that there were many more floating on the surface of the sea."
The interviews with 16 survivors during this investigation provide coinciding versions of what happened that morning in which only 104 people survived, while about 600 sank in one of the deepest areas of the Mediterranean. Witnesses say that, unlike the official Greek version, they did cry out for help, repeatedly and desperately. "Around 13.00 a plane flew over us and we started making hand gestures asking for help. By that time two people had already starved to death and we put the bodies on the captain's cabin on top of the ship so the plane could see them," says Amin, a Syrian survivor in his 40s.
Three witnesses also say that the coastguard ordered them to continue the journey to the Italian rescue zone, outside their responsibility. "Our agreement with the Greek Coast Guard was that we would follow their boat to Italian waters where there was a rescue ship that could take us to Italy. [The Greek ship] had a green light and we followed it until our engine stopped working," recalls Manhal, a Syrian bricklayer, in his 30s, who lost his brother in the shipwreck.
A deadly drag
A blue cape is the key that begins to dismantle the initial version of the Greek authorities. At first, the Coast Guard denied having thrown any rope at the fishing boat, but, according to the survivors who were able to tell their version of what happened to journalists, the hypothesis that the Coast Guard did tow the fishing boat was gaining strength. Those responsible for the rescue operation have ended up acknowledging that they threw a rope, but that in no case was it to drag the boat. Much less to Italy. Greek authorities have alleged, among other things, that the Italian search and rescue zone was more than 130 kilometers away, a distance that would require two to three days of navigation.
Hassan, a 23-year-old Syrian, gives details of the risky operation. "They told us they would take us to the [Italian] rescue ship, which was only two hours sailing west. We were towed like a car. The first time, our ship was about to capsize, but it stabilized. The second, the boat tilted to the right and capsized, not even giving me time to make the decision to jump into the water. After cutting the rope, the Coast Guard ship began to move away from us." Several testimonies corroborate this version.
Maher, a 26-year-old Syrian dentist, shares his memories of that early morning from Malakasa refugee camp, 40 kilometres from Athens. I was on the deck when we capsized, I fell into the water and the boat created a huge wave that threw me about 30 meters from it. It was very dark. The Greek ship stopped about 500 meters from us, maybe more. I'm still confused...why didn't he come back? Why did they stand still? They could have saved many lives."
Survivors of the shipwreck rest in a warehouse in the port of Kalamata, 240 kilometers from Athens.Thanassis Stavrakis (AP)
It is not the first time that the Greek Coast Guard, known for expelling migrants and refugees from its waters, has been accused of a very similar action. The European Court of Human Rights last year condemned Greece's action on a boat carrying 27 Afghan, Syrian and Palestinian refugees sailing off the Greek island of Farmakoni in January 2014. The Greek coastguard tried to tow the overloaded boat until it capsized. The shipwreck killed 11 women and children. Also then, the Greek coastguard claimed that panic and sudden movements of the refugees on board had caused the boat to sink.
Beyond the Adriana, the Greek Coast Guard's action in the Aegean Sea is stirring Frontex's guts. Violations of international law in its waters have prompted the border agency's fundamental rights officer to recommend that it stop cooperating with Athens. The main concern is the documented practice of dragging groups of refugees out to sea and placing them in lifeboats that lead them to Turkish waters. The official, according to the New York Times, has called for the "strongest possible measures" to bring Greece back into compliance with the law.
Copy and paste testimonials
The coast guard has criticized that the testimonies of the survivors, sparing at first, have been enriched by the influence of external agents. "The change in the content of the statements coincides with the transfer of the witnesses to Malakasa where, against their own suggestions, members of NGOs and lawyers quickly accessed," the Greek daily Kathimerini reported this week.
But what the analysis of the statements given by the survivors to the Coast Guard points out is another type of intervention. The official interviews record at least four almost identical statements about a key moment of the voyage and the shipwreck despite the fact that they were conducted by four different people with different translators. In one of the cases, it is also established that one of the coast guards acted as a translator. The number of virtually identical sentences suggests that a statement has been copied and pasted into several interviews. According to official documentation, the four would have literally said: "Many people started complaining because [we were] without food and water and many passengers thought that the [captain] had gotten lost and did not know where to go to get to Italy, so the captain was forced to ask for help."
About the time of the shipwreck there are also literal coincidences in two statements that, coincidentally, omit any responsibility of the Coast Guard. The two, before different interpreters and at different times, would have said verbatim: "At some point in the night a Coast Guard boat arrived to help and suddenly the boat capsized [...] Then they rescued us with an inflatable boat. Then two-three more ships arrived [...]. At dawn, we were transferred to one of them and taken to the port where we are now. They also gave us water." Also according to the documents, four people testified in virtually the same words that the fishing boat sank because it was "old" and "there were no life jackets."
Of the nine statements to the Coast Guard to which this investigation has had access, only one mentions the towing of the fishing boat as the cause of the disaster after having heard it from someone. But in the interviews those same witnesses gave to the prosecutor, six of them do describe more profusely how their boat was dragged before capsizing.
The investigation has interviewed two of those nine survivors who testified, first to the coast guard and then to the prosecutor. Both maintain that the Coast Guard omitted part of their testimony in which they mentioned the towing of the fishing boat. "They asked me what happened to the ship and how it sank. I told them that the coast guard came and tied the rope to our boat, towed us and caused the capsizing," explains one of them. "They didn't write that in my statement," he says. This survivor also says he felt pressured to falsely identify the traffickers. "They asked me about Egyptian traffickers... I was tired, so I told them what they wanted to hear," he explains.
A young man talks with some of the survivors of the shipwreck on June 19 in the refugee camp of Malakasa, 40 kilometers from Athens. Petros Giannakouris (AP)
Eight months cloistered in a warehouse
When the Adriana sank, many of the victims were already presumed dead. The 750 people who got on that boat paid, beyond the 4,500 euros of the passage, months of mistreatment and extortion that they assumed as the only way to flee their countries and reach Europe. The Libyan network that organized the trip, with branches in Lebanon and Syria, kept part of the passage in a warehouse near Tobruk, a city 150 kilometers from the Egyptian border. They had no contact with the outside world, no passport and could only eat one portion of bread and one piece of cheese a day. The guards, survivors say, beat them, insulted them and killed anyone who gave trouble. "If you dug around the warehouses in Tobruk, you would find a lot of bodies," Kamal announces. There are those who were locked up there for eight months waiting for the mafia to give the green light to leave the ship.
Both Greece and the European Commission and Frontex have blamed the mafias for the tragedy, although they omit that, in some cases, the mafiosi who profit from the money of migrants also do so with European funds, which they receive in exchange for the promise of stopping the arrival of people. As confirmed by three different sources, one of the main leaders of the network that organized the departure of the Adriana works for the Libyan Navy, under the control of General Khalifa Hafter, leader and warlord in the east of the country. According to a Libyan source, a curfew was decreed on the night of the Adriana's departure to facilitate the operation. Nothing that happens in that area escapes the general's control. Hafter has recently been invited by Italy and Malta to find ways to curb irregular immigration to the EU.
Once at sea, the crossing, which was supposed to last a maximum of three days, became complicated. On the second day they realized that the captain was lost. The ship was commanded by a dozen Egyptians who worked for the criminal network and who, according to the statements of some survivors, beat and insulted the rest of the passengers. "Fear and panic got the better of us," Kamal recalls. "We wanted to ask to be rescued, even if it was the Libyan coastguard, we were in danger," Manhal recalls.
On the third day the food and water ran out and people started to get sick and faint. It was extremely hot during the day and very cold at night. An Egyptian and a Pakistani were the first to die of thirst. Then the captain died, they say of a heart attack. The passenger drank seawater sweetened with dates and urine mixed with dirty water from a radiator.
That is why, during the afternoon of the fourth day, when two oil tankers, at the request of the Coast Guard, approached the Adriana to deliver supplies, confusion and panic reigned and fights for food and water. "We asked the second boat that came (Faithful Warrior) that we didn't want water and groceries because they were creating panic by throwing the bottles at us. We asked them to get us on board, that their boat was big, but they did not accept to rescue us," Manhal maintains, contrary to the official version that ensures that a ransom was never requested.
When the boat had capsized, around two in the morning of June 14, dozens of people climbed the hull and upside down, but the waves produced by the sinking of the fishing boat and by the movement of the Coast Guard patrol made it difficult to maintain themselves. The castaways, they say, clung as best they could to what was left of the Adriana. Four testimonies claim that the Greek ship, instead of proceeding to the immediate rescue, caused more casualties by surrounding the boat and generating large waves around.
"I was exhausted and swam to our boat. I grabbed onto a piece of metal for about 10 minutes, but the boat that sank us came close and caused a big wave. All the people who were holding on fell into the water," recalls Samir, a 37-year-old Syrian. A second wave made the fishing boat disappear. "As if nothing happened," he says. "The Greek ship did nothing for almost 30 minutes," Maher accuses. "I have no explanation. Why didn't they return immediately? If they had, at least, they could have rescued many refugees who were still alive."
"It took time until they sent a small boat," agrees Nassim, a 20-year-old who fled Syria. He says the ship he accuses of sinking them was watching them from a distance. "We were afraid to approach and swam away until we saw that they started rescuing." One of the Egyptians who survived remembers staying two hours in the water, floating waiting. "The Greek ship was about 50 meters away and they didn't do anything for half an hour."
Manhal, the bricklayer who lost his brother, does remember a quick intervention by the coast guard after the sinking, but he had already been presumed dead by the time he saw the cape tied to the bow of the fishing boat. "We knew towing was a dangerous move. Even someone without experience would tell you that to stabilize a boat you must use ropes from both sides of the boat and not only from the front ... They're coast guards, we thought they knew what they were doing."
With information from Bashar Deeb, Tomas Statius, Sara Creta, Klaas van Dijken and Eman El-Sherbiny.
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