Overloaded rescue ship sails away from desperate migrants

TRIPOLI

Horrific scenes unfolded in the Mediterranean on Saturday night as a full-to-capacity rescue ship sailed away from desperate migrants trying to swim towards it.

During a dramatic 24 hours, the crew of the Norwegian Siem Pilot and another aid boat rescued panicked migrants in the dark, with only limited resources and in the face of aggressive people smugglers.

Around 2,400 migrants were rescued and 14 bodies pulled from the water, according to the Italian coastguard.

“I’ve never had a SAR (search and rescue) like it.

“We were transferring 1,000 migrants from the Okyroe (tanker) to the Siem Pilot when suddenly, rubber boats appeared in the dark.

It looked hopeless,” said Pal Erik Teigen, the police officer in charge of the rescue.

Migrants aboard one of the rubber boats that had yet to be rescued desperately sought to reach the ship, which by that point was full to capacity and unable to take on more people, motoring towards it while crying out for help.

Around 25 people threw themselves into the water in a bid to swim towards the Siem Pilot, forcing the captain to pull back.

PULLED THE MIGRANTS

Speed boats from the Siem Pilot later pulled the migrants from the sea and the dinghy and transferred them onto the tanker to wait rescue by another vessel, while the Medecins Sans Frontieres charity’s Dignity picked up the dead.

Teigen and his team are just one part of a massive effort under way in the Mediterranean to rescue migrants seeking to reach Europe.

Jan Erik Valen, an intelligence officer and crew member who provided security for the operation — part of the EU’s Frontex border force mission in the region — described the panic that greeted him as he boarded the overloaded tanker during the initial rescue.

“It was chaos. They were pushing us towards the only way off the boat, coming from everywhere and pushing for life jackets,” he said.

“Then they came up from behind us and we had to call for back-up. Other police officers from the Siem Pilot joined us with riot gear. We were banging our sticks on pipes to make a lot of noise, and we hit a few of them.”

Several of those who were rescued fainted and had to be dragged aboard the Siem Pilot.

One of the migrants passed a baby from a stricken inflatable launch into the hands of a rescuer.

The Siem Pilot team faced not just the extreme danger of the sea rescues, but also had to contend with confrontational people traffickers.

“There was a facilitator boat which was very aggressive. We used the ship’s search light to scare it off but it was determined to try and retrieve the dinghies we rescued the migrants from,” Teigen said.

Following the operation, conditions on the dinghies deteriorated as temperatures soared and the crew was forced to stop any more migrants boarding the ship, according to a journalist on the vessel.