What was the Greek coastguard doing instead of rescuing 750 people?
The officer's voice can be heard speaking to the fishing vessel seven hours before it and the hundreds of desperate people on board would capsize into the sea in one of the biggest wrecks to ever take place in the Mediterranean.
Instead of conducting rescue operations that could have saved over 500 people who died in the wreck, mostly Egyptian and Pakistani nationals who had boarded the irregular migration voyage from Libya to seek a better life in Europe, the Greek coastguard can be heard instructing the passengers in distress to tell passing commercial vessels that they don't want to enter Greece's maritime zone.
A recording of the 6:51 pm call is audible in one of the files the Greek coastguard submitted to the Piraeus Naval Court that is investigating its role in the 2023 shipwreck, obtained and reviewed by OmniaTV.
The call, only audible in the background of one of the submitted files, discredits the narrative that was put forward by the coastguard immediately after the wreck: that the people on board did not want Greece's help and insisted that they wanted to travel to Italy — and that nine of survivors of the wreck were responsible for the death of the majority of the passengers.
OmniaTV's examination of the recordings, which document some calls between the coastguard and other vessels in the final hours before the Adriana sank, shows that the coastguard was aware of the desperate conditions on board and that instead of acting to rescue them, it spent hours in advance of the wreck creating a set of documentary evidence that would exempt it of any responsibility toward the passengers in danger.
The Greek outlet, as well as lawyers of the survivors and the passengers who died, and the Greek Ombudsman investigating the wreck independently, also point to gaps in the evidence submitted by the coastguard to the investigating court.
Following the concerns raised by several entities and the evidence that has emerged from the recordings, a new round of preliminary investigations was launched earlier this year — almost two years after the wreck — into the Greek coastguard's actions.
All signs of emergency, no sense of urgency
Although details of what the coastguard actually did in the hours before the shipwreck are difficult to confirm due to gaps in the official statements and evidence submitted, the accounts of other entities that played a role during the boat's final hours at sea provide a picture.
What emerges is that it was clear to the coastguard, more than 12 hours before the Adriana capsized, that the boat was near Greek waters and the many people on board were in distress.
Italy based activist Nawal Soufi first shared information about the boat with the Italian authorities after she received a distress call from its passengers in the morning on June 13.
Italian authorities then informed the Greek coastguard's Joint Rescue Coordination Center (JRCC) at 11.00 am that the overcrowded boat in distress was within the Greek search and rescue zone. Based in Piraeus, the JRCC operates under the Greek coastguard's authority and coordinates search and rescue operations within the Greek zone.
While the Greek coastguard confirmed in its official statement the following day that it made contact with passengers on the boat as early as 11 am on June 13, it stressed that the passengers refused to be rescued in Greece.
The coastguard was aware, however, that the people on board were in a dangerous situation. This information was conveyed to them by Alarm Phone, an activist hotline for migrants in distress in the Mediterranean, who sent an email to the Greek coastguard and Frontex later on the same day stating that passengers were 'urgently requesting assistance.'
Instead of sending a rescue vessel to assist, the coastguard sent two commercial vessels carrying food and water, which it said were the only kind of assistance the passengers required as 'they wished to continue on to Italy.'
The captains of both commercial vessels echoed the dangerous situation in their reports to the coastguard, but they were also dismissed.
In a call between the captain of the Lucky Sailor, the first commercial vessel that approached the sinking boat on the evening of June 13, and a JRCC official, the captain can be heard saying that the Adriana was overcrowded to the point where people on deck were unable to stand up. The Greek official fails to address the captain's concerns, however, neglecting to engage with his description of the boat's dangerous situation on the call.
Description: Call between JRCC operator and the Lucky Sailo r captain, on June 13, 2023, at 20:10:42.
Courtesy: OmniaTV
Then, when the Faithful Warrior, the second commercial ship, approached the sinking boat at around 9 pm, its captain also reportedly informed the coastguard that it was ' rocking dangerously ' because of the large number of people visibly on deck.
These reports of danger from the hours before the wreck were nowhere to be found in the Greek coastguard's retelling of the events in the following days, with its officials insisting instead, on multiple occasions, that the Adriana 's passengers did not request Greece's help.
The coastguard also refused offers of help by Frontex in the hours before the boat sank.
In an internal report from December last year, Frontex, which also received Alarm Phone's email, said it informed the coastguard that the boat needed assistance shortly afterward and, on five separate occasions until the time of the shipwreck, offered to assist the coastguard in its operations. All offers were rejected.
Instead of accepting assistance, a joint investigation by Mada Masr and OmniaTV at the time revealed that the coastguard instructed Frontex's drone to patrol a different area where another incident was taking place on the same day.
Frontex concluded in its report that the coastguard launched rescue operations when it was 'already too late' to save the people aboard the Adriana.
Staging impunity
What was the coast guard doing in the meantime?
The answer is indicated by a conversation between coastguard officers that can be heard in the background of one of the recorded calls, though documentation of the conversation itself was not among the recordings submitted as evidence. In the call, which took place shortly before 6 pm, the officers can be heard discussing the narrative Greek authorities would repeat over and over on the following days.
A JRCC operator tells his colleague that it would be 'convenient' if it is written in the logbook of the Lucky Sailor that the Adriana 's passengers refused to be rescued in Greece, according to a transcript of the call published by OmniaTV.
Another JRCC operator can be heard later in the background of a second recorded call, a little before 7 pm, instructing passengers to tell an approaching commercial vessel that 'we don't want to go to Greece.'
Description: Call between JRCC operator and the Radio and Television Center on June 13, 2023, at 18:51:34.
Courtesy: OmniaTV
Audio editing: Alexandre Mitri
A little after 8 pm that night, the captain of the Lucky Sailor told a JRCC operator that this is what the people aboard the Adriana did. The same JRCC operator then requested that the Lucky Sailor's captain be careful to document the fact that people on the Adriana had asked not to go to Greece.
'They told you that they don't want to stay in Greece and they want to go to Italy, they don't want anything else?' the rescue center official asked in the recorded call submitted to court.
The captain replied that passengers on deck screamed 'Italia' when he asked 'Greece or Italia?' — just as they had earlier been instructed to do by the JRCC.
'Captain, I want you to write this in your logbook, the bridge logbook,' the rescue center official is heard instructing through the recording. 'I want you to write that they don't want to stay in Greece and they want to go to Italy. That they want nothing from Greece and they want to go to Italy.'
Description: Call between the captain of the Lucky Sailor and JRCC official on June 13, 2023, at 20:10:42.
Courtesy: OmniaTV
This insistence was vital in supporting what the Greek Shipping Ministry would assert in its recounting of events the next day: that the hundreds of men, women and children who had been stuck at sea in the Adriana for days were intransigent and did not want the help that was offered to them.
The ministry claimed that the Adriana 's passengers had thrown supplies offered to them into the sea, something that one of the survivors told The Washington Post at the time was done because the bottles of water were thrown at them by the trade vessel and the movement was causing the boat to rock worryingly, putting them in danger of capsizing.
Missing evidence
None of the communications between the JRCC and the rescue vessel, before the shipwreck, nor any of the JRCC's communications with the Adriana, with the exception of the call audible in the background of another recording, were included in the evidence submitted by the coastguard to the Piraeus court.
The captain of the first and only boat that the Greek coastguard sent, the PPLS 920, said in court that he was instructed to depart toward the boat in distress by noon on June 13, in his deposition in an earlier case which tried nine Egyptian migrants who were eventually acquitted of charges of causing the boat to capsize.
But after the PPLS 920 's departure from Crete, it approached the distressed boat and 'remained at a distance and observed it discreetly' at 10:40 pm, according to the coast guard's statement the next day.
After that, the only recorded contact between the PPLS920 and the JRCC is 24 minutes before the boat sank, at 1:40 am on June 14, reporting on the failure of the fishing trawler's motor. Even the call detailing the capsizing is not included in the evidence submitted.
It was, however, quoted in the coastguard's records on June 14 that at 2:04 am, an official on board the Lucky Sailor informed the Shipping Ministry that the fishing vessel 'took a right, then a sharp left and another right so great that it resulted in its overturning.'
But none of the communications made by JRCC in the most critical period of the incident, between two and a half hours prior to the shipwreck until around 18 minutes after it occurred, were included in the submitted evidence.
Instead, it submitted to the court 12 calls made between the JRCC and its rescue vessel in the hours following the capsizing, where they planned recovery operations of the people who were thrown into the sea.
In an attempt to justify the gap in the evidence, the coastguard has claimed that it was due to a 'complete collapse of the JRCC telecommunications system,' adding that in this case, communications are usually made from 'analog devices' and are therefore unable to be recorded.
However, according to OmniaTV, there is no record of the JRCC's telecommunications system failing during that period of time.
Other factors that made it difficult to review the coastguard's actions on the day of the shipwreck were that the rescue vessel it sent to monitor the Adriana was not provided with a black box, or Voyage Data Recorder — despite recommendations by Frontex to Greek authorities in 2021 which require all Frontex-funded Greek rescue vessels, like the PPLS-920, to record operations.
The vessel's cameras were also out of order, as reportedly claimed by the coastguard to the Greek Ombudsman, which launched its investigation after the coast guard refused to launch an internal one. The coastguard argued at the time that its crew were instead focused on rescue operations. The coastguard later claimed that while the cameras did work, images were not stored due a long-term failure in the recording system, according to the Greek authority. The type of rescue ship sent by the coastguard is equipped with two state-of-the-art thermal camera systems.
These ' gaps and omissions ' were also noted to be present in another evidence file submitted by the coastguard at the request of the Greek Ombudsman. The independent authority highlighted in a statement earlier this year that data from the mobile phone of the rescue vessel captain, now in possession of the Piraeus court, and all conversations between the captain and the JRCC until the boat capsized were among the most crucial undisclosed pieces of evidence.
The authority has also accused senior Greek coastguard officers of 'a series of serious and reprehensible omissions in the search and rescue duties,' holding eight of its senior members responsible for the death of hundreds.
Lawyers representing the survivors and those who were killed also mentioned that crucial conversations between coastguard officials were not included in the evidence submitted to the Piraeus Maritime Court, which began initial investigations into the Greek coastguard's role in the shipwreck in June 2023 and concluded them in December. The lawyers submitted a petition to the court in which they mentioned the missing evidence in the same month.
The lawyers are contesting the Piraeus court's lack of investigation into the actions of the Greek maritime authority's high-ranking officials. The deputy prosecutor of the court has so far summoned only the captain and crew of the rescue vessel.
OmniaTV has also found that not only did the Piraeus Naval Court Prosecution not receive the calls made by the coastguard's rescue operations, but they did not request them.
According to OmniaTV, before submitting evidence, the coastguard had formed a committee to select audio recordings and written transcripts of the calls it made on June 13 and in the early hours of June 14. Justifying the selection of evidence, the guard claimed that it was necessary in order to distinguish the calls related to the Pylos shipwreck from those concerning a separate incident that occurred on the same day.
Lawyers of the survivors and several rights groups have also highlighted the coastguard's lack of accountability and unwillingness to submit all the evidence from the time of the shipwreck. The court's deputy prosecutor re-launched initial investigations into the coastguard earlier this year and then referred 17 members of the Greek coastguard to criminal investigation in May, including officials in higher positions, finally turning the spotlight on the coastguard's role in the case almost two years after the initial incident.
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