Nine Egyptians who could be charged with manslaughter over the latest mass shipwreck in the Ionian Sea are in custody in Greece. They will testify before a judge on Monday, which could help shed light on the structure of one of the criminal organizations that have turned the central Mediterranean into a graveyard, with scrapped Libya as the main springboard for illegal immigration.
At the moment, the captain has not appeared and the nationality of those who pocketed around three million euros to send hundreds of congeners adrift is not even known. Among them, a minimum of twenty women and children – up to a hundred, according to other sources – who would have died without exception, for having been locked in the hold, to separate them from a congested deck.
The unsuspecting first filled the fishing shell to overflowing with more than half a thousand passengers, with a fare of 4,000 to 6,000 euros, more typical of a pleasure cruise. His viacrucis began on Saturday morning in Tubruq, Libya – despite the fact that the ship had arrived from Egypt – and ended abruptly on Wednesday morning, almost without groceries or water and still halfway to Italy.
When things got ugly, the smugglers and the crew jumped on the inflatable boat and abandoned the customers, of course, without anything resembling a life jacket. One of the 104 survivors remembers it, knowing how to swim saved his life.
Another victim, a Syrian, yesterday attributed the shipwreck to the sudden movement of the passage to get the groceries that, with the best of intentions, was offered by an aid ship. The ship, cramped, listed and overturned.
This has not avoided criticism of the Greek authorities, who failed to know or were unable to prevent the catastrophe, despite Frontex monitoring the ship’s trajectory since midday and a Greek coastal patrol following it closely for several hours.
Greek sources say that before midnight they threw a rope to the fishing boat, to tow it to the coast, but that elements on board rebelled and ended up cutting it. “No help, go Italy”, they would have shouted, in macaronic English (“Ajuda no, go Italy”).
Along the way, some desperate calls to entities that work from Europe to promote rescues.
Faced with the scale of the drama, with few precedents in Greece, with 78 bodies rescued – only one of which belongs to a woman – and at least three hundred more at the bottom of the sea, there were protests in some Greek cities on Thursday. From UN bodies, it has also been criticized that Athens – currently with a provisional government – did not manage to coordinate a rescue action in time.
Illegal immigration avoids Greece lately, because of the greater control in refugee camps and increased deportations and aware of the greater difficulties, in any case, to reach the heart of Europe through the Balkans. Something that has led to establishing increasingly long and dangerous routes, despite the fact that with larger ships, to try to reach the Italian continental coast in dramatic situations. From the east of Libya – instead of the west, closer – or Lebanon.
Many of the survivors of the shipwreck, who were trying to enter the European Union illegally, were being driven this morning in buses from Kalamata to the Malakassa detention camp, near Athens. The Greek government assures that the asylum applications that are presented 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 guns have fallen silent in Libya or Syria – they will be deported.
The overload of shells is not pure greed, but the result of a perverse calculation that takes into account the humanitarian response of the other side. In fact, the Greek authorities estimate that the operation in question had been “between 40 and 50 days” in the making. Whether they make it to the European Union or get deported or end up at the bottom of the sea, they all paid in advance. Many of them, after contacting them through social networks.
The nine Egyptians arrested, all between the ages of 20 and 40, have been accused by the Kalamata prosecutor of forming a criminal organization dedicated to the trafficking of irregular emigrants, causing a shipwreck and endangering lives.
It should be added that the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Jeremy Laurence, stressed on 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 channels” and to improve “shared responsibility” regarding “safe and timely disembarkation in rescues”.
