The bodies of eleven migrants were spotted off the coast of Libya by the Seabird aircraft, owned by Seawatch, and were then recovered by the ship Geo Barents, owned by Doctors Without Borders, which was in the area after having rescued two boats. The Geo Barents was assigned the port of Gonova, more than 600 nautical miles from the site of the intervention, where it is now heading with 165 people and the eleven corpses on board.
As Seawatch explained on social media, “today our Seabird plane spotted eleven lifeless bodies off the coast of Libya, we don’t know if they are all part of the same phantom shipwreck. This is what happens in the Mediterranean, even when no one sees it”.
The organization then says that it “tried to contact a Libyan patrol boat, in English and Arabic via radio, to retrieve them but with no response. For them and for the EU these people are worth nothing even in death”.
The ship Geo Barents then intervened which, as Juan Matias Gil, head of mission of Doctors Without Borders, said, had intervened during the night to rescue a fiberglass boat and a rubber dinghy, the first with 37 people on board, the second with 109. “We had been assigned the port of Civiavecchia – explains Gil – two hours later they sent us a communication of the change of port to Genoa, more than 600 nautical miles, a thousand kilometres, from the rescue station”.
“Since the Sea Watch plane had spotted bodies floating not very far from our location, the Italian Coast Guard allowed us to go and recover the bodies.”
It took four hours to get to where they were, another four or five hours to recover the bodies.
“In the meantime – writes MSF on social media – our team spotted a boat from the bridge with 20 people on board, which MSF teams managed to rescue safely”.
For Doctors Without Borders, we are thus witnessing “once again the result of the devastating and bloody European policies regarding migration and lack of assistance to people crossing the Mediterranean”. “We know that people will continue to travel dangerous roads in a desperate attempt to reach safety, and Europe must find safe and legal routes for them. This catastrophe – concludes MSF – must end”.
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