Egyptians accused in Pylos shipwreck case deny smuggling, blame Greece | Refugees News | USAEMALL.com

Names marked with an asterisk have been modified to guard identities.

Athens, Greece – Saeed* can not perceive why he’s within the Avlona jail, a detention centre northeast of the Greek capital Athens.

“Whoever asks me why you are in prison, I answer that I don’t know,” stated the 21-year-old Egyptian. “We’re children, we’re terrified. We are told that we will be sentenced to 400 or 1,000 years in prison. Every time they say that, we die.”

He is amongst 9 Egyptians in pre-trial detention and charged with felony accountability for a shipwreck off the city of Pylos final yr, which led to the deaths of a whole lot of individuals attempting to achieve Europe.

The group is being charged below Greek legislation with forming a felony organisation, facilitating unlawful entry and inflicting a shipwreck.

They are the one individuals being held over the shipwreck.

However, Al Jazeera, in partnership with Omnia TV and the Efimerida ton Syntakton newspaper, can reveal that each one 9 accused declare they weren’t among the many smugglers who organised or profited from the journey.

They say they have been merely passengers who survived and allege that the Greek Coast Guard brought on the overpacked boat to capsize.

Speaking through phone from detention, they instructed Al Jazeera and its companions that the Greek prosecution didn’t precisely take their testimonies and that they pressured them to signal paperwork they didn’t perceive with violence or below threats of violence.

Two separate survivors additionally stated the 9 accused weren’t responsible and pinned blame on the nationwide Hellenic Coast Guard.

Fearing reprisals for talking out towards the Greek state, all 11 sources requested Al Jazeera to hide their identities and use pseudonyms for this text.

The 9 accused, who embody fathers, employees and college students, stated they paid between 140,000 to 150,000 Egyptian kilos ($4,500 to $4,900) to a smuggler or an affiliate to board the doomed boat.

“I am telling you, I am someone who paid 140,000 Egyptian pounds,” stated Magdy*, one other of the accused. “If I am the guy who put these people on the boat, I’ll have like seven, eight, or nine thousand euros. Twenty thousand euros. Why on earth would I board a boat like this?”

In 2022, a smuggler instructed The Guardian that he fees Egyptians about 120,000 Egyptian kilos ($3,900). Recent reporting has discovered that these travelling from Syria typically pay about 6,000 euros (about $6,500) for such a journey.

The two different survivors, each Syrians, stated they paid cash to individuals however not the accused Egyptians. The 9 being held weren’t concerned in smuggling, they stated.

“No. They weren’t to blame for anything,” stated Ahmed*.

On that fateful day final yr, June 14, the Adriana, overloaded with an estimated 700-750 individuals, together with Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Afghans and Palestinians – amongst them kids – capsized. The derelict blue fishing trawler had departed from Libya 5 days earlier.

Only 84 our bodies have been recovered and 104 on board have been rescued, which means a whole lot died in one of many worst-recorded refugee boat disasters on the Mediterranean.

Rights teams, activists and a few survivors allege that Greek Coast Guard officers failed of their duties to save lots of lives at sea.

Ahmed stated he noticed the 9 accused throughout the chaos because the ship appeared able to capsize, and passengers started to panic and run about.

“They were just directing people when our ship started to tilt. They were shouting for people to steady the ship,” he stated.

Seven of the accused preserve that they noticed a Coast Guard patrol boat tie a rope to the fishing trawler. The Greek officers pulled as soon as, then twice, inflicting the boat to flip over into the Mediterranean, they are saying.

“I saw the Greek boat had tethered a thick blue rope, one rope, to the middle of the boat,” stated Fathy*, one other of the accused males. “They pulled, the boat leaned sideways, they saw it was leaning, they kept going, so the boat was turned upside down.”

“Greece – a Greek boat, towed us and capsized us – and killed our brothers and friends and now I look at myself and I’m in prison.”

Two of the accused said they have been within the maintain and didn’t perceive what had occurred till after catastrophe struck, once they have been on board the Greek Coast Guard boat.

The two Syrian survivors instructed Al Jazeera they witnessed the Greek Coast Guard tug the fishing trawler.

“They had nothing to do with the boat sinking. That’s obvious,” stated Mohammad*, of the Egyptians being held.

“You have to be logical. It was a big boat and wouldn’t have sunk if no one had intervened. The engine was broken but it could have stayed afloat. The Greek Coast Guard is truly responsible for the sinking.”

The Hellenic Coast Guard denied the allegations, saying it has “absolute respect for human life and human rights”.

“However, in cooperation with the legal authorities and other relevant bodies, appropriate control mechanisms shall be put in place where necessary,” its assertion to Al Jazeera learn.

Initially, the coast guard didn’t consult with any rope-related incident in its official statements and its spokesman Nikos Alexiou denied the rope experiences.

However, Alexiou later stated that the 2 boats have been “tied with ropes to prevent them from drifting” in a press release that got here amid rising accounts from survivors.

An ongoing inquiry within the naval courtroom of Kalamata goals to find out whether or not the Hellenic Coast Guard carried out search and rescue correctly.

A current Frontex incident report of the Pylos shipwreck discovered that “it appears that the Greek authorities failed to timely declare a search and rescue and to deploy a sufficient number of appropriate assets in time to rescue the migrants”.

The begin date of the trial for the 9 accused males has not been set, though in keeping with Greek legislation, it ought to start inside 18 months from once they have been first detained. If the lads are discovered responsible, they might face many years in jail.

‘After I signed, he hit me’

The 9 males say they offered their testimonies on the Kalamata police station the day after the shipwreck below duress. They have been pressured to signal paperwork in Greek that they might not perceive, they stated.

Two stated that law enforcement officials and translators current throughout the interrogation beat or kicked them.

Saber* stated he was given papers in Greek and expressed that he didn’t need to signal them.

“[The interpreter] told me that he would sign next to my signature. As if nothing happened,” he stated. “After I signed, he hit me.”

Saber* stated he noticed the police kick one other one of many accused within the chest.

The Hellenic Police didn’t reply to requests for touch upon these allegations.

Greece has lengthy been accused by rights teams of unfairly accusing harmless individuals of smuggling – and sentencing them.

Dimitris Choulis, a lawyer on the defence who has spent years engaged on related instances with the Samos Human Rights Legal Project, sees this episode as one other instance of the “criminalisation of refugees”.

“We see the same patterns and the same unwillingness from the authorities to actually investigate what happened,” Choulis instructed Al Jazeera.

A 2021 report by the German charity Border Monitoring discovered at the least 48 instances on the islands of Chios and Lesbos alone of individuals serving jail time, saying they “did not profit in any way from the smuggling business”.

Choulis stated that smuggling trials used to final simply 20 minutes and lead to sentences of fifty years in jail.

This is in line with experiences from watchdog teams similar to Borderline-Europe that smuggling trials in Greece are rushed and “issued on the basis of limited and questionable evidence”.

The Lesbos Legal Center, which can be engaged on the defence of the 9 Egyptians, bemoaned a extreme lack of proof, saying the investigation file relies “almost exclusively” on a handful of testimonies taken in “questionable circumstances”.

Additionally, Al Jazeera has reviewed leaked paperwork from the courtroom case, together with a criticism filed by the defendant’s attorneys that an professional report from a marine engineer and a naval mechanical engineer – ordered as part of the investigation – used minimal proof: three images, two movies, and one e-mail. The report didn’t account for the overturning and sinking of the ship, the criticism alleged.

The defence additional questioned the impartiality of the appointed specialists and said that procedures concerning how the defendants ought to be notified of this professional report weren’t adopted.

Al Jazeera reviewed the response; the Kalamata Public Prosecutor dismissed the criticism, arguing {that a} additional professional report could be redundant and that the procedures have been actually adopted appropriately.

“I firmly believe that the Hellenic Coast Guard caused the shipwreck,” stated Choulis. “And the Hellenic Coast Guard conducted all of the pre-investigation of this case, and they ordered the marine engineer to do the analysis. I guess it’s clear the problem here.”

Four of the accused males stated they handed water to individuals sitting subsequent to them.

Choulis defined that in earlier trafficking instances, giving individuals water has certified as smuggling.

“We have seen the authorities charging people, and in Pylos the same, for acts like providing water, distributing food, having a phone, taking videos, looking at the GPS, contacting the authorities, trapping a rope to tow their boat to be rescued etc.”

Gamal* can not perceive how handing somebody water is taken into account smuggling.

“Of course, if you have a bottle of water in your hand and someone next to you is dying of thirst, won’t you give them water?” he stated from jail. “No. Here, this is considered human trafficking.”