ATHENS, Greece (AP) – The Greek Coast Guard on Friday defended its response to a ship that sank off the country’s southern coast, leaving behind more than 500 migrants believed to have drowned. Criticism of Europe’s years of failure to prevent such tragedies grew.
Patrol boats and a helicopter spent a third day searching the area of the Mediterranean Sea where the laden fishing vessel capsized early Wednesday in what could be the second-deadliest shipwreck on record for migrants, according to the UN Migration Agency. The worst case came when a ship en route to Italy capsized off the coast of Libya in April 2015, killing an estimated 1,100 people.
Hellenic Coast Guard spokesman Nikos Alexiou said that both the coast guard and private vessels repeatedly offered assistance to the ship via radio and loudspeakers on Wednesday while it was in international waters, also en route from Libya to Italy were rejected.
Alexiou argued that any attempt to tow the overcrowded trawler or get hundreds of unwilling people onto nearby ships would have been too dangerous.
“There will be unrest and people will be in turmoil – which unfortunately happened in the end,” Alexiou told state broadcaster ERT TV. “You will have caused the accident.”
Alexiou also said that after accepting groceries from a merchant ship, the trawler’s passengers refused a rope they used to bring more from a second merchant ship “because they thought the whole process was a way for us to take them to Greece.” bring to.”
Greek authorities sent the first ship, the tanker Lucky Sailor, to deliver food and water to the migrants. The company that manages the tanker said on Friday that people on board “were very reluctant to accept help and that the boat began to maneuver away with any attempt to approach”.
Eastern Mediterranean Maritime Limited said in a statement that people on the trawler were eventually persuaded to accept supplies.
Experts said the law of the sea obliges the Greek authorities to attempt a rescue.
Given the condition of the ship, they definitely have “a duty to initiate rescue measures,” said Professor Erik Røsæg of the University of Oslo’s Institute for Private Law. He said a refusal to provide aid could be overturned if it was deemed inappropriate, as appeared to have been the case on Wednesday.
Flavio Di Giacomo of the UN Migration Agency’s Mediterranean Office tweeted that all refugee boats should be classified as dangerous and rescued immediately because “even if they don’t seem to have any problems, they can sink in minutes.”
Rescuers pulled 104 survivors from the water and later recovered 78 bodies, but have been unable to locate any more since late Wednesday. The Hellenic Coast Guard said the search and rescue operation would continue beyond the standard 72 hours.
The UN migration and refugee agencies issued a joint statement calling timely search and rescue at sea “a legal and humanitarian necessity” and calling for “urgent and decisive action to prevent further fatalities at sea”.
A group of NGOs, including Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, said the EU should “stop looking to the sole solution to dismantling” smuggling networks and set up state-led search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean.
“The Greek government had a special responsibility to every passenger on the ship, which was clearly in distress,” Amnesty International’s Adriana Tidona said. “This is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, all the more so because it was entirely avoidable.”
Greece and other southern EU countries, which are usually the first destinations for asylum-seekers traveling to Europe by sea, have tightened border protection measures, widened walls and intensified sea patrols in recent years.
“It’s a European problem. “I think it’s time that Europe can establish an effective migration policy in solidarity so that situations like this don’t happen again,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said late Thursday during a press conference at the UN headquarters in New York.
According to the EU Executive Committee, the 27-nation bloc is close to an agreement on how member countries can share responsibility for caring for migrants and refugees making the perilous journey across the Mediterranean.
Legal investigations into the causes of the sinking are currently underway. Greek officials say the ship capsized minutes after the blackout and suspect panic among passengers may have caused the boat to list and overturn.
Most of the survivors were taken to migrant shelters near Athens on Friday from a storage hangar in the southern port of Kalamata, where relatives were also gathering to search for loved ones.
Abdo Sheikhi, a Kurdish Syrian living in Germany, traveled to Kalamata to find out what happened to five family members on the boat.
On Friday, he found only his younger brother Ali and one other relative survived. He managed to phone Ali, who was transferred to the camp near Athens.
“(Ali) told me that he jumped off the ship while the others couldn’t jump,” Sheikhi said. “They were scared. They held the boat as it swayed.”
Nine people – all Egyptian men between the ages of 20 and 40 – were arrested and detained on Friday and charged with people smuggling and involvement in a criminal enterprise. 27 of the survivors remain hospitalized, health officials said. The smuggling suspects are due to appear in court on Monday.
The IOM estimated that there were up to 750 people on the boat, and Jeremy Laurence, spokesman for the UN human rights office, said “a large number of women and children” were among those missing.
The survivors were all boys and men from Egypt, Pakistan, Syria and the Palestinian territories. Alexiou, citing reports from survivors that women and children were among the passengers in the hold of the fishing boat, said the number of missing, believed to be in the hundreds, is still unclear.
Officials at a state morgue outside Athens photographed the victims’ faces and collected DNA samples to begin the identification process.
Late on Friday, the Greek Coast Guard said a naval helicopter had located a sailing boat carrying migrants off southwest Greece after being alerted by Italian authorities. It said three merchant ships had reached the ship, which reported no problems and was en route to Italy. According to ERT TV, there were probably around 60 people on board.
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Associated Press journalists Frances D’Emilio in Rome, Renata Brito in Barcelona, Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, Lebanon, and Costas Kantouris in Thessaloniki, Greece contributed to this report. ___
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