A Greek merchant vessel approached the boat, reportedly at the request of the Coast Guard, and its crew began tossing food and water to passengers on the deck, who scrambled to collect the supplies. According to the Times, dozens of families were below deck, and the Associated Press spoke with a survivor who said that he had paid extra to ride on the upper deck.Įarly on Tuesday, Europe’s FRONTEX border agency spotted the Adriana in international waters, at a location in the Greek Coast Guard’s search-and-rescue territory. But the smugglers, to whom some of the passengers had paid as much as nine thousand dollars, urged them to board. The rusted, aging trawler, which was reportedly eighty to a hundred feet long, didn’t look as if it could make the more-than-five-hundred-nautical-mile journey-particularly carrying hundreds of people. The survivors were then transferred to a camp near Athens, where their movement is heavily curtailed, and reportedly they have been told not to speak to journalists.įive days before the Adriana sank, according to Kathimerini, Greece’s newspaper of record, when the migrants first saw the boat, in Libya, some of them wanted to abandon the trip. They were offered much food by the locals, more than from the municipality.” She added, “There was no psychiatric support or translator whatsoever.” The government said that the migrants were held there to be interviewed in order to find the smugglers, she said, and that those who were not charged were released after several days. Everyone was on the floor-they were on military-issue mattresses. “There were only a few cracks of light coming in from atop the walls. “It was a place that was not for humans,” she said. There were no major problems or traumas.” The rest were held in a storeroom. Of the survivors, she told me, “Twenty-seven of them were in the hospital. Linos, who specializes in epidemiology, has studied refugees and migrants in Greece for the past ten years through the Prolepsis Institute, a public-health N.G.O. Athena Linos, a doctor who was elected as a Member of Parliament for the center-left party Syriza on Sunday, visited the migrants the day after the shipwreck, when they were being held in a hangar in the city of Kalamata. But many questions remain about both the actions of the Coast Guard and the treatment of the survivors. Nine Egyptian men who had been on board are being held by the Greek authorities in pretrial detention according to the Associated Press, they are charged with various crimes, including negligent manslaughter and people smuggling. On a recent campaign stop, he denounced the smugglers who had lured the migrants on to the Adriana, then castigated political opponents who criticized rescue services, saying, “We are also very disappointed with those who, with this tragedy, found an opportunity to denounce their own country and the Coast Guard, which made a commendable effort to save hundreds of people in extremely difficult conditions.” Kyriakos Mitsotakis, a former financier with undergraduate and business degrees from Harvard, and the leader of the conservative New Democracy Party, was seeking a second term as Prime Minister: he won a first-round election last month and the second round, on Sunday, by a large margin. It was election season in Greece, and the tragedy quickly became political. It is one of the worst shipwrecks in the Mediterranean’s history. Only a hundred and four have been found alive. As many as seven hundred and fifty men, women, and children are believed to have been on board. On June 14th, in the middle of the night, it capsized, then sank, while a Greek Coast Guard vessel was stationed just a short distance away. Five days later, the Adriana-which was actually a fishing trawler, and dangerously overcrowded-became stranded in deep waters to the southwest of Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula. boat,” headed for Italy, and what they hoped would be a better life in Europe. They left the port of Tobruk, Libya, on what their families thought was a “a V.I.P. The migrants were mostly Pakistanis, Syrians, Palestinians, and Egyptians.
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