Shipwreck in Pylos: Traffickers are being sought among the rescued

While the search for the missing persons continues, the rescued give statementσ about what happened and as soon as this process is completed, they will be transferred, as announced by the Ministry of Immigration, to the structure in Malakasa.

As the hours pass, the hopes of finding survivors from the tragedy are fading, while the authorities have still not specified the number of missing persons, with the refugees speaking of 700 people, among them women and children.

The relatives of the victims and the missing are anxious about the fate of their own people and send photos to doctors at the Kalamata hospital in order to learn about them.

The official "numbers" of the Coast Guard

According to information from the Coast Guard, the official death toll is 78 and not 79 as originally reported. Of those rescued, 47 are Syrian, 43 Egyptian, 12 Pakistani and 2 Palestinian. Among them there are 10 minors, 5 Egyptians and 5 Syrians.

It is not yet clear if the captain of the boat is among the missing, as information is unclear. However, according to the testimony of the activist who was the first to contact the refugees before the shipwreck, it seems that the passengers told her that the driver of the boat had abandoned it and thus they could not head for Italy as they did not know where to go.

Surveys of the rescued

Unconfirmed information speaks of an investigation by the authorities in order to identify the traffickers among the rescued, but no arrests have been made so far. Besides, it is a common tactic of the port authorities after shipwrecks to search for traffickers among those who have been rescued, and they usually make arrests as well.

At the same time, the deputy prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Giorgos Oikonomou, takes over the supervision of the investigations and investigative actions carried out concerning the wreck with many deaths off Pylos, by order of the prosecutor of the Supreme Court, Isidoros Dogiakos.

In Kalamata, at the place where the investigations are being carried out, the head of the Kalamata Prosecutor's Office, Polyxeni Tsouli, is supervising all the procedures.

The tragedy has taken on international dimensions with reports in the press speaking of a watery grave, while there is no lack of spikes about the actions of the coast guard who, while they knew about the existence of the ship which was suffocatingly full of refugees and immigrants, did not catch the wreck.

Indicative is a publication by the Italian La Republica, which talks about the failure of the Greek authorities to intervene, while claiming that the fishing boat with hundreds of people had started "toward the coasts of the Peloponnese" and did not eventually chart a course for the coasts of Calabria.

And Le Monde quoting Vincent Cochetel, special envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) for the Western and Central Mediterranean, reports that Greek rescue boats are accompanying the slave ships until they are sure they are out of its borders of their own rescue zone of responsibility.

The corpses of the victims at Schistos 

The victims of the tragedy were transported by refrigerated truck to a special area in Schistos Korydallos in order to begin the autopsies to clarify the causes of death and to make an attempt at identification.

The investigations will be carried out by the forensic services of Athens and Piraeus as the relevant infrastructure does not exist in Kalamata.

The dimensions of the tragedy are unimaginable and unprecedented for Greek data.

However, the exact number of people on board remains unclear, with the testimonies of rescued migrants about the number of children and women who were in the holds of the fatal fishing boat shocking.

As reported by state broadcaster ERT, rescued people brought to the doctors of the Kalamata hospital who treated them told them that there were about 100 children in the holds of the boat.