At a little after 8am on Friday, Fadi, a Palestinian, freshly arrived from Amsterdam, joined the throng of aid workers, activists and journalists gathered around a warehouse in Kalamata’s port.
The 29-year-old was on a mission. “I thought I had spotted my little brother Mohammed among pictures of the [shipwreck’s] survivors,” said the Syrian-born chef, who has lived in the Dutch city for the past decade. “I knew he had gone to Libya to board the boat, so, praying to Allah he was still alive, I decided to get on a flight.”
Within hours of arriving in this port town, Fadi’s wish would come true in an electrifying moment caught on camera. “He had a photograph of his brother and wanted to talk,” said Themis Kanellopoulos, a Greek MEGA TV reporter who was interviewing him at the time. “As the camera was rolling, as he was relating the terrible circumstances that had brought him here, he saw Mohammed through the metal fence near the warehouse where the survivors were being kept. The euphoria of witnessing the two of them come together, right at that moment, was just incredible.”
The reunion of the two brothers is among many heartbreaking scenes that have played out in Kalamata since a fishing trawler, bound for Italy with perhaps as many as 750 people on board, capsized off the southern Peloponnese, a disaster of such magnitude that its effects are being felt well beyond the confines of Greece.
The tragedy, among the worst in living memory in the Mediterranean, has officially left 78 dead, all men bar one. But as hopes of finding survivors evaporated on Friday, the third and final day of an extensive search and rescue operation, Greek officials had become ever more resigned to the death toll being closer to 500. Hopes of recovering the vessel, which sank in some of the deepest waters in the Mediterranean, have been ruled out altogether.
Mohammed, who grew up in war-torn Aleppo with his brother, is among the 104 passengers who, having paid more than $4,000 (£3,100) each for the doomed journey, made it out alive. “He wanted to live the dream,” said Fadi, who travelled to Europe – via Greece – as part of an earlier wave of asylum seekers 10 years ago. “They all wanted to. I can’t believe that I found him. I am so happy.”
For relief workers, who have pieced together the trajectory of a tragedy that many believe could have been averted – if migrants denied safe passageways weren’t forced to rely on people smugglers using increasingly dangerous routes to reach the west – it is a miracle that any survived at all.
On a vessel that was visibly overloaded, hundreds of women and children, according to migrant testimony given to the Greek coastguard, were “locked” below deck in the boat’s hold. Piloted by its Egyptian crew – nine of whom were arrested on people-smuggling charges late Thursday – the ship is believed to have sailed the high seas for three days before it sank.
“The accounts of what happened have been shocking,” said Areti Glezou at the psychosocial support group, Thalpos, which has spent much of the past week helping survivors at Kalamata’s general hospital. “Survivors told of how they began to drink from the sea and even their own urine when they ran out of water and food. One man described how he swam through waters filled with the bodies of dead kids as the ship went down. I don’t think I will ever forget that.”
The fishing trawler had been spotted initially by the EU border agency, Frontex, more than 12 hours before its engine failed, and the Greek coastguard was communicating with its captain before it capsized late on Tuesday. By late afternoon, coastguard officials claim, the vessel was observed sailing on a “steady course”.
“They refused our offer of help, saying, ‘We go to Italy,’” said Greece’s acting civil protection minister, Vangelis Tournas, in the post as part of a caretaker government until general elections later this month. “The ship was in international waters. Had we done anything more, it would have been considered intervention.”
But questions have mounted as inconsistencies in the coastguard’s version of events have surfaced. On Friday, for the first time, Greek officials admitted that a rope had been thrown to the stricken vessel late at night, fuelling speculation that the trawler may have been tugged before it suddenly listed and sank.
Shock has gradually turned to anger, with protesters taking to the streets across Greece to deplore the authorities’ handling of the incident, and European policies that have “turned the Mediterranean into a watery cemetery”.
“I lost 45 relatives on that boat, a whole village, including my brother Yousaf,” railed Mohammed Yunis, a Pakistani taxi driver who has lived for more than four decades in the UK.
“I want answers,” he said, standing outside the Greek coastguard’s harbourside headquarters with other relatives who had travelled to Kalamata. “The authorities here are fucking lying. They knew the ship was there. They knew it was in trouble. They did nothing to save it. They wanted the people on board to die.”
Adding to a sense among some that the truth is yet to emerge are questions over why no video footage taken from a coastguard vessel has been released.
“In all incidents like this a video is taken. The big question is where is this video?” said Christos Spirtzis, an MP with the leftwing Syriza party contesting general elections next week.
The head of the 350-strong Lawyers Association in Kalamata told the Observer that it was only a matter of time before an inquiry would be opened into the way Greek authorities dealt with the stricken vessel.
“At the critical moment did the coastguard do the right thing?” asked Kostas Margelis, the association’s president. “There are a lot of questions that clearly need to be answered.”
