Photo credit: BBC
Witnesses have alleged that the Greek coastguard has caused the deaths of migrants in the Mediterranean over three years.
The BBC reports that the witnesses said the migrants were thrown overboard deliberately. Nine among more than forty people were said to have died as a result of being forced out of Greek territorial waters or taken back out to sea after reaching Greek islands.
However, the Greek coastguard refuted the allegations.
When a former Greek senior officer was the footage of 12 people being loaded into a Greek coastguard boat to be subsequently abandoned on a dinghy, he said it was “obviously illegal” and an “international crime”.
The Greek government has for long been accused of forced returns, specifically pushing migrants back towards Turkey, where they came from. The act is illegal under international law. However, this is the first time the BBC has calculated the number of incidents that fatalities allegedly occurred due to Greek coastguard actions.
The 15 incidents analyzed occurred between May 2020 and 2023. They resulted in 43 deaths, and eyewitnesses corroborated four of the cases
In five incidents, grants alleged they were thrown directly into the sea by the Greek authorities. In four cases, they explained how they had landed on Greek islands but were hunted down. In several other incidents, they were put onto inflatable rafts without motors, which then deflated or appeared punctured, according to the migrants.
A Cameroonian said Greek authorities hunted him after landing on the island of Samos in September 2021. He said he was planning to register on Greek soil as an asylum seeker.
He said, “We had barely been docked, and the police came from behind. There were two policemen dressed in black and three others in civilian clothes. They were masked; you could only see their eyes.”
He, a fellow Cameroonian, and one man from the Ivory Coast were transferred to a Grek coastguard boat, where events took a terrifying turn.
“They started with the (other) Cameroonian. They threw him in the water. The Ivorian man said, ‘Save me, I don’t want to die…and then eventually only his hand was above water, and his body was below.
Slowly, his hand slipped under, and the water engulfed him.”
The Cameroonian who was being interviewed said his abductors beat him.
“Punches were raining down on my head. It was like they were punching an animal.” He said they also pushed him into the water without a life jacket. But he was able to swim to shore.
However, the bodies of the other two – Sidy Keta and Didier Martial Kouamou Nana – were recovered on the Turkish coastline.
The survivor’s lawyers are demanding the Greek authorities open a double-murder case.
An overloaded trailer flipped in front of a Greek coastguard patrol boat in June 2023. Over 600 men, women and children died in the water.
A man from Somalia told the BBC how, in March 2021, he was caught by the Greek army on arrival on the island of Chios. The army handed him over to the Greek coastguard. According to him, the coastguard tied his hands behind his back before throwing him into the water.
“They threw me up zip-tied in the middle of the sea. They wanted me to die,” according to him.
However, he managed to survive by floating on his back before one of his hands broke free from the ligature. But the sea had many small waves. Three in his group died.
The incident with the highest loss of life happened in September 2022. A boat carrying 85 migrants ran into trouble near the Greek island of Rhodes when its motor cut out.
Mohammed from Syria was one of the passengers. He said they ran the Greek coastguard for help, and when help came, they were loaded onto a boat and returned to Turkish waters before being put in life rafts. According to Mohammed, the raft he and his family were given had not had its valve properly closed.
He said, “We immediately began to sink, they saw that… They heard all the screaming, and yet they still left us.”
He continued by saying, “The first child who died was my cousin’s son…After that, it was one by one. Another child, another child, then my cousin himself disappeared. By the morning, seven or eight children had died.
My kids didn’t die until the morning…right before the Turkish coastguard arrived.”
Greek law allows all migrants to register their asylum claims on several of its islands at special registration centres.
However, those interviewed said they were apprehended before getting to the centres. They alleged the men who arrested them were operating undercover since they were ununiformed and often masked.
Human Rights groups say thousands of people seeking asylum in Europe have been illegally forced back from Greece to Turkey and denied to seek asylum, which is enshrined in international and EU law.
