On May 26th, judges at a court in Crotone, Calabria, began the penultimate day of preliminary hearings to decide whether two members of the Italian coastguard and four members of the Guardia di Finanza law enforcement agency should face trial over the sinking of the Summer Love, off the coast of Cutro. It was a tragedy which claimed the lives of 94 people in February 2023 and made headlines across Europe.
Away from the glare of that trial, Mediapart has pieced together the less-reported story of another migrant vessel which just over a year later, in March 2024, drifted for nearly a week in the central Mediterranean despite having been spotted days earlier by the European Union border and coastguard agency Frontex. Here is its story.
It was not yet midday on March 13th 2024 when Ocean Viking, the rescue ship chartered by the non-governmental organisation SOS Méditerranée, set course towards a boat in distress that had been reported to it. From the deck the rescuers scanned the horizon. Around ten miles away, a small speck appeared. As the three rigid inflatable rescue boats launched from the Ocean Viking drew closer, they could make out men waving their shirts from a rubber dinghy.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
“The people were silent and distraught, one of them had two streams of tears running down his face, while not crying out or moving,” says Jérôme, then in charge of the ship's Search and Rescue (SAR) team. There were 25 people aboard, Gambians, Senegalese and Malians. Nearly half were unaccompanied minors. The youngest was 12. Two people were unresponsive, lying on hastily-nailed planks at the bottom of the dinghy. One died shortly after.
Help refused
At the time of the rescue, the boat was around 75 miles north of Zawiya on the Libyan coast, from where it had set off a week earlier. Yet the dinghy had been sighted more than once. “Every day, for three days, a helicopter came close to us, then turned around and left again. We also saw drones at night,” said one survivor, interviewed by the NGO Alarm Phone.
His account has been backed by two other survivors later questioned by Mediapart. They, too, have spoken of the presence of fishing boats or merchant ships, some of which stopped near the dinghy before sailing away. “We waved to them to help us, to give us food or water, many died from drinking seawater,” says Moudu, a 21-year-old survivor from Senegal. “Every day we saw boats and helicopters but no one came to rescue us.”
After a failed first attempt at around 1am, the rubber dinghy had finally set course for Italy during the night of March 7th. According to survivors, between 75 and 85 people were on board. As the boat slipped into the night, it was battered by ever-larger waves. In the distance, the lights of the Bouri oil platform blinked through the darkness. “The engine broke down,” Moudu recalls. “We kept going, without a motor.”
Fuel spilled into the bottom of the boat and mixed with the water that was threatening to swamp the dinghy. The now-useless jerrycans were emptied and cut open to be used for bailing out water. Some passengers stood up, wanting to jump into the sea in the hope of being saved. Others stopped them. These were the first signs of hallucinations among those on board. According to survivors, this moment coincided with the time that their boat was first seen by Frontex.
Frontex helicopter
An Eagle 1 helicopter, a surveillance aircraft used by Frontex, spotted the vessel on March 8th at 8.49pm Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The boat was then in the Libyan search and rescue zone. A Frontex plane left the area 17 minutes later after sending a “Mayday relay” message to the Italian, Maltese and Libyan rescue coordination centres. Under normal procedure it was they who were supposed to take over and begin search and rescue efforts. But for almost 40 hours nothing happened.
On board meanwhile, the water level had reached the migrants' knees. “We moved with the waves,” says Moudu. “We had a rope to try and steer the boat but it didn’t work.” The GPS phone on board was no longer working. Hunger gnawed at them. The two-year-old child travelling with his mother no longer had the strength to cry. The last bottle of water was given to him so he would not have to drink seawater. He died soon afterwards.
At dawn on the third day, the uncle of one of the passengers managed to contact the NGO Alarm Phone to report that the boat was in distress. The coordinates he gave were about 8 miles from those logged by the Eagle 1 helicopter. The boat had already drifted. Half an hour later, the NGO alerted the Italian, Maltese and Libyan rescue centres. Two Frontex helicopters returned to the area but could not find the boat.
“The central Mediterranean is as large as France or Spain,” explains Frontex spokesman Chris Borowski. “Searching for a rubber dinghy there is extremely hard, we made four additional flights on top of the first one to find this boat, to no avail.”
The Libyan, Italian and Maltese rescue coordination centres did not respond to the Mayday relay message. None of them has replied to Mediapart's requests for an interview either.
Libyan responsibility
Frontex’s Fundamental Rights Office, which monitors the agency’s duty to uphold human rights under European and international law, concluded in a report seen by Mediapart: “The Libyan authorities had an obligation to coordinate and take responsibility for rescuing this migrant boat, as it never left the Libyan search and rescue zone and the Libyan authorities were informed at least four times that a boat was in distress.”
Forty hours after Frontex first sighted the boat, and nearly 30 hours after Alarm Phone raised the alarm, the Italian rescue coordination centre did finally issue an Inmarsat alert “on behalf of the Libyan coastguard”. When asked by Frontex’s Fundamental Rights Office to explain this 40-hour delay in raising the alarm, the Italian coastguard did not respond.
If you slept, even for three or four hours, when you woke up you went mad. And if you went mad, you died.
Yet though the Inmarsat alert had been issued, no rescue operation was launched. The boat was assigned a search and rescue case reference, SAR number 225. The coordinates for it were still those from the first Frontex sighting. The boat, meanwhile, continued to drift.
The eventual rescue took place just under 17 miles from the spot reported by the Italian authorities. Put simply, without updates to the boat’s position as it drifted, it was almost impossible for the NGO ships patrolling the area to find it. Twice, on March 9th and 11th, the sea rescue vessel Life Support had tried to locate the dinghy, without success.
Back on board, the deaths were mounting up. “People were talking to the air as if calling on their families to come and save them,” recalls Moudu. Some thought they were buying cigarettes and jumped into the sea, in despair. Within seconds their bodies vanished beneath the waves. At night, the madness worsened. “If you slept, even for three or four hours, when you woke up you went mad,” remembers Ali. “And if you went mad, you died.” He recalls seeing what he thought were trees in the distance, and spending hours convincing one of his friends on board to go with him to the supermarket to get home. Meanwhile Frontex made two further flyovers of the area on March 10th and 11th, again with no result.
Left to drift
By the fifth day, the dinghy had lost at least half its passengers. “The hardest thing was having to throw the bodies into the sea,” says Moudu. “No one wanted to do it but we had to, for their dignity, to stop the bodies rotting at the bottom of the boat.” At such times prayers broke the silence. “It was the least we could do for someone who died in front of us when we could do nothing, it was like throwing them into God’s arms,” he says.
The line between life and death grew so fine for some that the other passengers waited for hours, even a full day, before deciding a body was truly lifeless. Those still able to move were told to check for stiff hands or unresponsive pupils. When the rescue ship from SOS Méditerranée finally saved them, none of the survivors had the strength left to stand or walk.
For the NGO Alarm Phone, this was a clear case of a boat “left to die”, in other words deliberately allowed to drift. In its report, the Frontex Fundamental Rights Office also blamed poor communication between the national rescue centres who were supposed to coordinate the operation. “We spotted the boat, issued a Mayday call, and alerted the rescue centres in the zone,” the Frontex spokesman explains. “That’s our duty, but we have no power to coordinate rescue efforts.”
On his phone, Moudu scrolls through the messages from fellow survivors, and their constant prayers for those who died. “Those who were lost at sea had a mission, to bring hope to their families,” he says. With help from a Sicilian charity, he has been trying for months to find out where his friend Abdou was buried. Abdou had been with him on the boat and died soon after being taken to hospital. Moudu wants to visit his grave, to show his parents where their son now lies.
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- The original French version of this report can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter