Europe

Coast Guard Accused of Deliberately Abandoning Migrants at Sea: Report

HORRIFIC

People say they were rounded up by masked men before being forced onto an engineless dinghy.

A Greek Coast Guard officer throws a towing rope at a drifting dinghy overcrowded with refugees and migrants off the Greek island of Lesbos, after the dinghy crossed a part of the Aegean Sea from the Turkish coast, Sept. 21, 2015.
Yannis Behrakis/Reuters

Disturbing video footage appears to show the Greek Coast Guard taking a group of migrants to sea and abandoning them in a raft, according to The New York Times. The footage allegedly shows a group of 12 people—including a 6-month-old baby—being taken out of a van on the island of Lesbos and transferred to an unpowered dinghy in the middle of the Aegean Sea on April 11. The Times described the disturbing footage as an “extrajudicial deportation” in contravention of local and international law amid a rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment across Europe. “We didn’t expect to survive on that day,” said Naima Hassan Aden, a 27-year-old from Somalia who said she was with her infant on the vessel. “When they were putting us on the inflatable raft, they did so without any mercy.”

Read it at The New York Times