The Greek coast guard caused the death of dozens of migrants in the Mediterranean over a three-year period. In one of these cases, 9 migrants were deliberately thrown into the water causing their deaths. This is what he reports an investigation by BBC which collected several testimonies. The nine victims mentioned in the document are among them over 40 people who are presumed to have died as a result of being forced to leave Greek territorial waters or returned to sea after reaching the Greek islands. There BBC analyzed 15 incidents – dated May 2020-23 – citing local mediathe NGO and the Turkish Coast Guard. “Verifying such accounts is extremely difficult: witnesses often disappear or are too afraid to speak out. But in four of these cases we were able to corroborate the accounts by speaking to eyewitnesses,” she writes BBC.
In five incidents, the migrants claimed to have been thrown directly into the sea by the Greek authorities. In four of these cases they explained how they had landed on the Greek islands but had been hunted. In several other incidents, migrants said they were picked up inflatable rafts without an engine which then deflated or appeared to have been punctured. The Greek government has long been accused of forced repatriations, i.e. pushing people back to Turkey, where they came from, which is illegal according to international law. But this is the first time that an investigation has calculated the number of accidents in which the victims are believed to have died due to the actions of the Greek coast guard. Interviewed by BBCthe Coast Guard firmly pushed back all charges of illegal activities.
The full content of the investigation BBC is present in the documentary of the British broadcaster entitled ‘Dead Calm: Killing in the Med?‘. Among the testimonies, a Cameroonian man, who landed on the island of Samos in 2021, said he was hunted on the island by “policemen dressed in black” with their faces covered, who forcibly transferred him together with two other migrants to the Coast Guard patrol boat. After being beaten, the man said he was thrown into the sea together with his other companions without life jacket. Only the Cameroonian migrant managed to swim to shore, while the bodies of the other two, Sidy Keita And Didier Martial Kouamou Nanawere recovered on the Turkish coast.
