COAST GUARD FIRED AT MIGRANT BOATS,
EUROPEAN BORDER AGENCY DOCUMENTS SHOW
August 23, 2016
Zach Campbell
On a smuggler’s boat from Turkey two years ago, 19-year-old Rawan watched the passengers start to panic as a Greek coast guard vessel approached them head on, circling twice. Rawan heard two gunshots ring out from the Greek patrol. Fearing arrest, the driver of Rawan’s boat, a Turkish fisherman, turned the vehicle around to flee back to Turkey. Then Rawan heard more shots.
When the bullet hit her in the lower back, at first she felt nothing. Then, Rawan says, it felt like fire.
Rawan’s husband had made it to Germany a year earlier; both were fleeing their home in Damascus, Syria. Rawan and 12 other Syrians were headed for the Greek island of Chios on a small fiberglass boat, much faster than the inflatable dinghies that many refugees use for the 5-mile crossing.
Before the shots, Rawan heard “stop” blare over a loudspeaker on the coast guard vessel. She and four others were in the forward compartment of the boat, and more people were sitting in the back near the outboard engine. Rawan’s father-in-law, Adnan Akil, was also shot in the lower back, and Amjad A., another Syrian refugee who asked that only his first name and last initial be used, was shot in the shoulder.
Akil says he clearly remembers the chain of events leading up to the shooting. One officer had a pistol, the other had a submachine gun. Akil, Rawan, and other witnesses say they heard one officer shoot in automatic bursts. “We were shouting and screaming for the driver to stop,” remembers Braa Abosaleh, another Syrian refugee who was on the boat that day.
When the driver didn’t stop, the coast guard rammed their boat from the back right side. Akil and Rawan remember the driver stopping the boat, pretending he was going to surrender. As the officers put down their weapons and approached, the driver fired up the engine again and turned back toward Turkey. This time, the coast guard shot directly at the fleeing boat.
Finally, after the second round of shots, the driver stopped. From just outside the front compartment, Abosaleh watched a coast guard officer board their boat and scuffle with the driver. Abosaleh says the officer beat the driver with the butt of his pistol before handcuffing him, an account confirmed by Rawan. The wounded were transported to the hospital and the rest of the refugees were taken to a hotel in Chios city for interrogation.
A report of damages from the March 2014 incident would later document a total of 16 bullet holes in the boat, centering on the front compartment.
Sitting on a couch in her apartment in northern Germany last month, Rawan nervously rolls one cigarette after another. She walks with a limp from the shooting. She insists on only publishing her first name; her family in Syria still doesn’t know she was shot. Rawan says the coast guard officers threw her and the others wounded into their boat “like animals.”
After the shooting, one of the coast guard officers involved was arrested. According to court reports, he admitted finishing a clip of 30 bullets and reloading before continuing to shoot. In court, the two other officers aboard blamed him, saying he acted on his own and not on orders from his superior. The shooting was treated as an isolated event.
Less than a month later, a Greek court ruled that the coast guard officers, including the one arrested, did nothing wrong; they were shooting to stop a suspected smuggler.
Yet a collection of incident reports from Frontex, the European Union’s border agency, obtained by The Intercept, reveals a broader Greek and European tactic of using weapons to stop boats driven by suspected smugglers — and injuring or killing refugees in the process. (In the Greek islands, Frontex operates alongside the coast guard, patrolling the sea border with Turkey. In many cases, the information in these documents was reported to Frontex by the Greek coast guard as part of their joint operations.)
The documents, which were meant to be redacted to shield operational details but were inadvertently released by Frontex in full, reveal multiple cases of firearms use against boats carrying refugees (The Intercept has electedto publish the unredacted versions to demonstrate how refugees’ lives were endangered during these incidents). The reports span a 20-month period from May 2014, two months after the Chios shooting, to December 2015. Each case of firearms use — even if it resulted in someone being wounded — was described as part of the standard rules of engagement for stopping boats at sea.
The Intercept
