‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help others on the boat’
“I am very sorry that I could not help the others on the boat, especially the women and children, but at that moment the situation was terrible.
I often think that the people who died could have been members of my family.”
These are the words of Mohamed Abdessalem, a 26-year-old Syrian, believed to be the sixth smuggler of the gulet Summer Love, which sank in front of the Steccato di Cutro beach on 26 February 2023 and in which 94 migrants lost their lives, including 35 minors , with an unknown number missing.
These are words contained in a declaration presented to the preliminary hearing judge of the Court of Crotone during the first hearing of the abbreviated trial in which Abdessalem is accused of aiding and abetting illegal immigration, negligent shipwreck and death as a consequence of the crime of aiding and abetting immigration. clandestine.
The twenty-six year old was arrested in December 2023 in the Lecce prison where he was detained in the context of the ‘Astrolabe’ operation of the DDA of the Salento city.
In his statements Abdessalem tells his story and the reason for fleeing from Syria to Turkey between 2015 and 2016.
He specifies that he rejected proposals to drive migrant boats, but after the earthquake in Turkey and Syria he changed his mind.
“I lost my home, job and security, I was forced to accept the offer to drive the boat and take another trip.”
The journey was precisely the one that ended in tragedy in Steccato di Cutro and “it began – he writes – from Turkey on 20 February 2023. I found myself on a very large boat, which I had never driven before. After several hours, the engine of this large boat stopped and broke down. I was forced to contact the person in charge of the trip to inform him that the engine of the large boat had stopped and broken.”
In the following he never says that he drove the Summer Love but that he only helped with repairs and relations with passengers.
“The second boat arrived, led by three Turks” who were “responsible for the trip and the boat, and the passengers were transferred to boat number 2. I admit that when it was necessary to give help during the trip I provided my assistance and I also helped repair the engine. Since I speak Arabic, when there were many questions I volunteered to explain the map images, our location and the itinerary to people who understand Arabic to calm them down.”
However, he admits that he was part of the crew although he specifies: “I was not paid any money. There was only the promise to pay upon my return to Türkiye.”
Regarding the conditions of the Summer Love, the young Syrian adds: “it was not prepared and equipped with safety measures”, furthermore “we did not have the means to measure the depth and it is not true that we had a jammer or a telephone block. Passengers were not able to make calls simply because they did not have an international SIM card.”
Finally the description of the tragic crossing: “At the beginning of the journey – writes Abdessalem – the sea was calm, but it began to change when we reached Italian territorial waters, it became high and rough. Total darkness everywhere and we saw light on the earth. The situation became unstable and the sea became rough, I have never seen a sea like this in my life, I was scared, I asked the captain to call for help, to avoid drowning, we fought against the high waves for about 4 hours , none of us knew the area, it was dark, we didn’t know where to go, the water started to enter the boat. The passengers were afraid, so we only thought about getting closer to the illuminated part of the land, we had no idea what the depth of the sea was when the boat collided, there was nothing we could do, they told us to jump into the sea and we jumped in too.”
