alarmphone.org | 16 November 2022
“Can you imagine how all of this violence affected my daughters?”
In the morning of 19 September, we were alerted by relatives to a boat in distress North of Rhodes in Greek waters. We could not establish direct contact to the travellers, but still we alerted the Hellenic Coast Guard. Around 12:15h CEST, the relatives told us that the Hellenic Coast Guard came, but took the people to a small, uninhabited islet and robbed them. They reported beatings and that all belongings were violently robbed from them. They could manage to hide one phone, but all others were stolen. They were finally pushed back onto the sea and left adrift.
On 20 September 2022 at 00.55 local time the Turkish Coast Guard found the group of 61 people on 2 inflatable boats off the coast of Muğla’s Datça district, as reports showed later. The Turkish Coast Guard stated that the people were pushed back to Turkish waters by Greek assets.
Days later we managed to talk with one of the survivors, a Palestinian single mother who had lived in the Alsham refugee camp in Syria for years. We want to share her testimony here: