The refugee boat capsized Wednesday morning off the coast of Greece had possibly a hundred children in the hold. That’s what people who survived the disaster say. Hundreds of passengers are still missing. The hope that someone will be found alive has been all but given up.
The death toll from the disaster – one of the largest with refugees in the Mediterranean – stands at 78. Rescue services managed to pull 104 people out of the water alive. It is unclear how many people on board the ship had in total. Estimates range from 400 to 750.
Eight of the refugees rescued are minors. Yet many more children would have been on board, eyewitnesses tell emergency services and the media.
“They told us that there were children on the bottom of the ship. Children and women,” doctor Manolis Makaris told the BBC. He is head of cardiology at the hospital in the coastal town of Kalamata, where survivors have been taken. Two patients told him about the number of children. “One told about a hundred children, the other about fifty. So I don’t know the truth, but there are many.”
Save the Children, an international organization dedicated to the welfare of children, says based on those eyewitness accounts that there were 100 children in the hold of the ship. One of the survivors answered ‘yes’ when asked by a Greek reporter if that was correct. The United Nations migration agency IOM previously spoke of at least 40 children.
UNICEF fears for the lives of the children who have not yet been found. “We can assume that many of them did not survive. Our deepest condolences go out to the children’s families and all those affected by this horrific event,” the organization said in a statement.
Desperately looking
Relatives of those on board are now desperately searching for their loved ones. Several of them have traveled to Kalamata. Like, for example, the 34-year-old Syrian refugee Kassem Abu Zeed. As soon as he heard of the disaster, he took the first possible flight from Hamburg to Greece, knowing that his wife Ezra and brother-in-law Abdullah were on the sunken ship.
The two risked the dangerous crossing from Libya to Italy to live with him in Germany after failing to obtain a visa legally. “We last spoke eight days ago,” the man tells the AP news agency. “She had paid $5,000 to smugglers. And we all know what happened now.”
The chance that Zeed’s 21-year-old wife and her 19-year-old brother survived the shipwreck is small. So far, no woman has been pulled out of the water alive. Zeed now especially hopes that his brother-in-law Abdullah is one of the surviving men. The survivors come from Syria, Egypt, Pakistan and the Palestinian territory. Those who are not in hospital are being cared for in an empty warehouse in Kalamata for the time being.
Retired Greek Coast Guard Admiral Nikos Spanos said the chances of finding survivors are slim, he told Greece’s public broadcaster ERT.
Erasmia Roumana, head of a delegation from the UN refugee agency UNHCR, says many of the survivors are mentally ill. They too are concerned about the fate of friends and relatives who were on board. “They want to contact their families and let them know they’re okay and they keep asking about the missing,” the woman said.
Information about missing family members is also sought from the countries of origin. For example, the AP news agency was able to speak by telephone with Mohamed Abdi Marwan, who is diligently looking for information about five family members who were all on board from Kobani, a Syrian town with a predominantly Kurdish population.
The man has not heard from or about them since the sinking of the ship. He assumes that his 29-year-old cousin Ali Sheikhi survived the disaster, as relatives recognized him on images of the survivors, but he has not yet received confirmation.
“How can they do this?”
“Those smugglers would only allow 500 people on the ship and now we hear that there were 750 people on board. What is this?! Is it cattle or is this people, how can they do this?” an emotional Marwan told the AP.
According to him, his relatives each paid $6,000 for the crossing. That amount is consistent with survivors’ accounts, who told doctors and dock workers they paid between $4,000 and $6,000 for a spot on the rickety, overcrowded fishing boat.
According to some survivors, the smugglers recruited ‘passengers’ via Facebook with the promise of a better life in Europe. Nine people have since been arrested by the Greek police. These are Egyptians between the ages of 20 and 40. They are accused of forming a criminal organization and people smuggling. The United Nations is calling for an investigation into the disaster.
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