Greece’s coast guard defends its actions as more than 500 migrants bound for Europe fear death in plane wreckage

ATHENS, GREECE (AP) — Greece’s coast guard on Friday defended its response to a ship that went down off the country’s southern coast, leaving more than 500 migrants stranded. Presumably drowned. Criticism mounted over Europe’s years-long failure to prevent such tragedies.

Patrol boats and a helicopter spent a third day scouring the Mediterranean as an overcrowded fishing vessel capsized early Wednesday, in what the United Nations migration agency said could be the second deadliest migrant shipwreck on record. The deadliest occurred when a ship capsized off the coast of Libya en route to Italy in April 2015, killing an estimated 1,100 people.

Greek Coast Guard spokesman Nikos Alexiou said that the coast guard and private vessels repeatedly offered via radio and loudspeakers to help the ship Wednesday while it was in international waters, also heading from Libya to Italy, but they refused.

Alexiou argued that any effort to withdraw the overcrowded trawler or transfer hundreds of unwilling people to nearby vessels would be too dangerous.

“You will have disruption, the number of people will go up – which unfortunately happened in the end,” Alexio told state-run ERT TV. “You will have caused the accident.”

Alexio also said that after accepting food from a merchant vessel, the trawler’s passengers refused a rope that would bring more from a second merchant vessel “because they thought the whole operation was a way for us to take them to Greece.”

The Greek authorities sent the first ship, the tanker Lucky Sailor, to give the migrants food and water. The company that operates the tanker said on Friday that the people on board “were very reluctant to receive any assistance, and at any attempt to approach the boat began to maneuver away.”

Eastern Mediterranean Maritime Limited said in a statement that those on board were eventually persuaded to accept the supplies.

Experts said that maritime law required Greek authorities to attempt a rescue.

Certainly they “had a duty to initiate salvage procedures” given the ship’s condition, said Professor Erik Rossig of the University of Oslo’s Institute of Private Law. He said a refusal to help could be overturned if it was deemed unreasonable, as it appeared Wednesday.

Flavio Di Giacomo, of the UN Migration Agency’s Mediterranean office, tweeted that all migrant boats should be considered dangerous and rescued immediately because “even when they appear to have no problems, they can sink in a few minutes.”

Rescuers pulled 104 survivors from the water and later recovered 78 bodies, but have not found them anywhere since Wednesday evening. The Greek Coast Guard said the search and rescue operation would continue beyond the standard 72 hours.

The United Nations migration and refugee agencies issued a joint statement calling for timely maritime search and rescue a “legal and humanitarian imperative” and calling for “urgent and decisive action to prevent further deaths at sea”.

A group of NGOs, including Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders, said the EU should “stop seeing solutions only in dismantling” smuggling networks, and setting up state-led search and rescue operations in the Mediterranean..

“The Greek government had specific responsibilities to every passenger on the ship, and they were clearly in distress,” said Adriana Tidona of Amnesty International. “This is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, especially because it could have been entirely prevented.”

Greece and other southern EU countries that are usually the first destinations For asylum seekers heading to Europe who travel by sea, they have tightened border protections in recent years, widening walls and stepping up sea patrols.

This is a European problem. I believe it is time for Europe to be able, in solidarity, to define an effective migration policy so that these types of situations do not happen again.

The EU’s executive committee says the 27-nation bloc is close to reaching an agreement on how Member States can share responsibility for caring for migrants and refugees who undertake the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean.

A judicial investigation is also underway to find out the reasons for the drowning. Greek officials say the ship capsized minutes after it lost power, speculating that panic among passengers may have caused the boat to stall and capsize.

Most of the survivors were moved on Friday from a storage hangar in the southern port of Kalamata, where relatives had also gathered to search for their loved ones.to immigrant shelters near Athens.

Abdo Sheikhi, a Syrian Kurd living in Germany, traveled to Kalamata to find out what happened to five family members who were on the boat.

On Friday, he found out that only his younger brother, Ali, and one other relative had survived. He managed to talk on the phone to Ali, who was taken to the camp near Athens.

My sheikh said: “He (Ali) told me that he jumped (from) the ship while the others could not.” “They were afraid. They were holding the boat as it swayed.”

Nine people – all from Egypt, between the ages of 20 and 40 – were arrested, detained and charged on Friday with people smuggling and participating in a criminal act. Health officials said 27 of the survivors remain in the hospital. The smuggling suspects are due to appear in court on Monday.

The International Organization for Migration estimated that the boat was carrying 750 people, and a spokesman for the UN human rights office, Jeremy Lawrence, said the missing included “large numbers of women and children”.

All of the survivors were boys and men from Egypt, Pakistan, Syria and the Palestinian Territories. The passengers in the fishing boat’s hold included women and children, Alexio said, but the number of missing, believed to be in the hundreds, remains unclear.

Officials at a government morgue outside Athens photographed the victims’ faces and collected DNA samples to begin the identification process.

Late Friday, Greece’s coast guard said a navy helicopter located a dhow with migrants on board off southwestern Greece after it was alerted by Italian authorities. She added that three commercial ships arrived at the ship, which had not reported any problems and was heading to Italy. ERT television said about 60 people were believed to be on board.

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Associated Press journalists Frances D’Emilio in Rome, Renata Brito in Barcelona, ​​Sarah El Deeb in Beirut, Lebanon, and Kostas Kantoris in Thessaloniki, Greece, contributed to this report. ___

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