He managed to speak on the phone to Ali, who has been moved to the camp near Athens. On Friday, he discovered that only his younger brother Ali and another relative had survived. Most of the survivors were being moved Friday from a storage hangar at the southern port of Kalamata, where relatives also gathered to look for loved ones, to migrant shelters near Athens.Ībdo Sheikhi, a Kurdish Syrian living in Germany, traveled to Kalamata to find out what happened to five family members who were on the boat. Greek officials say the vessel capsized minutes after it lost power, speculating that panic among the passengers may have caused the boat to list and roll over. The EU’s executive commission says the 27-nation bloc is close to an agreement on how member countries can share responsibility in caring for migrants and refugees who undertake the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean.Ī judicial investigation is also underway into the causes of the sinking. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said during a news conference at U.N. I think it’s time for Europe to be able, in solidarity, to define an effective migration policy for these kinds of situations not to happen again,” U.N. Greece and other southern EU nations that typically are the first destinations for Europe-bound asylum-seekers traveling by sea have toughened border protection measures in recent years, extending walls and intensifying maritime patrols. “This is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, all the more so because it was entirely preventable.” “The Greek government had specific responsibilities toward every passenger on the vessel, which was clearly in distress,” Adriana Tidona of Amnesty International said. The U.N.’s migration and refugee agencies issued a joint statement calling timely maritime search and rescues “a legal and humanitarian imperative” and calling for “urgent and decisive action to prevent further deaths at sea.”Ī group of nongovernmental organizations, including Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, said the EU should “stop seeing solutions solely in the dismantling” of smuggling networks, and set up state-led search-and-rescue operations in the Mediterranean. The company managing the tanker said Friday that the people on board “were very hesitant to receive any assistance, and at any attempt of approach the boat started to maneuver away.”Įastern Mediterranean Maritime Limited said in a statement that the people on the trawler were eventually persuaded to accept supplies. Greek authorities sent the first ship, the tanker Lucky Sailor, to give the migrants food and water. “You will have caused the accident.”Īlexiou also said that, after accepting food from a merchant ship, the trawler’s passengers rejected a rope bringing more from a second merchant ship “because they thought the whole process was a way for us to take them to Greece.” “Υou will have a disturbance, and the people will surge - which, unfortunately is what happened in the end,” Alexiou told state-run ERT TV. Egyptian family awaits word on son as village mourns dozens feared drowned trying to reach EuropeĪlexiou argued that any effort to tow the overcrowded trawler or move hundreds of unwilling people onto nearby ships would have been too dangerous.
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