[EN] BOAT TRAGEDY SURVIVORS ACCUSE GREEKS OF ILLEGAL PUSHBACK

Author: Emma Batha

Afghan migrant Fadi Mohammad (C), who says he lost his wife and three of his children when their boat capsized, is escorted by his son (L) and a compatriot after a prayer session in Athens, on Jan. 24, 2014. REUTERS/Giorgos Moutafis

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A survivor of a migrant boat tragedy in which a dozen people are thought to have drowned in Greek waters has given a harrowing account of last week’s disaster in which he saw his wife and four children perish as their boat sank while being towed by the coast guard.

Safi Ehsanullah said when he asked for help to save his children, one of the coast guards pointed a gun at him, according to an interview on the Greek news website Pandora’s Box. He also said coast guards beat back desperate migrants trying to scramble from their sinking vessel onto the guards’ boat.

[EN] THE HUMAN TIDE

Hope floats ... a boat carrying Tunisian migrants enters the Italian port of Lampedusa. Photo: AFP

Mark Baker Editor-at-Large, The Age

Refugees fleeing war and repression in Africa, Asia and the Middle East are flooding into economically depressed southern Europe, where they are being met with an increasingly harsh reception. 

The journey from one torment to another ends here, in a damp basement lit by a single faint globe. The boy has fallen asleep on a threadbare couch, exhausted after a long day scavenging in garbage bins. His sisters sit silently as their parents talk. There is no food, no money, no hope.

Most refugees have a terrible struggle to survive … Many are drowning or suffocating in trucks trying to get from Greece to other parts of Europe.