On Wednesday evening, a distress call reached the SEA-EYE 4. A rubber boat was damaged, water was coming in and people were calling for help. When the rescue ship’s fast rescue boats arrived, the crew faced a dramatic scene in the darkness.
The so-called Libyan Coast Guard was present at two rescues on Wednesday morning. Once they towed a wooden boat to shore, the other time they abducted a group of people in the Libyan civil war.
Data from AlarmPhone and the IOM for the first months in 2022 show the SEA-EYE 4 is still urgently needed. It seems that dying has become the norm, but we will never accept that.
These measures must never become the normality. It must always hurt us deeply in our hearts, because otherwise, we lose nothing less than the human right to life. A joint statement by Sea-Eye, German Doctors, Refugee Rescue and United4Rescue.
During the night from Wednesday to Thursday, a distress call reached the SEA-EYE 4 via AlarmPhone. 24 people were in distress in a small wooden boat in the Maltese search and rescue zone and called for help. Malta, meanwhile, remained silent.
Once again, Malta abandons refugees in distress at sea to their fate and refuses to provide any assistance to a container ship of the Hapag-Lloyd shipping line. Finally, the German rescue coordination center in Bremen intervened and called the SEA-EYE 4 for help.
A Libyan warship circled the SEA-EYE 4 for 50 minutes, repeating threats several times to make the rescue ship change course. The ship was in international waters the entire time.
In a joint statement, several organisations support the initiative of the mayor of Lampedusa and Linosa to restructure the accommodation and distribution of refugees and to align it with human rights.
On the occasion of the SEA-EYE 4’s sixth rescue mission in total, Sea-Eye and German Doctors explicitly call on the German government to treat all fleeing people equally and to demand the same from all other European member states.
A long mission comes to a good end! The crew is exhausted after hard days at sea. No wonder, because the mission already started with strong waves and various distress calls challenged the SEA-EYE 4.