It happened just after noon on April 11, when an unmarked white van drove into a small cove with a wooden jetty on the southern tip of Lesvos, according to a video analyzed by The New York Times after it was given to them by Austrian activist Fayyad Mula. , who has spent most of the last two and a half years offering his services on the island.

As the white van approached the coastline, two men with their faces covered were seen in the speedboat. When the van stopped, three men got out and unlocked the rear doors, from which 12 people, many of whom were young children, began to exit.

Passengers included Aden, a 27-year-old Somali girl, and her child Avale, with whom she initially left Jilib, a small town in the Somali region controlled by al-Shabaab, a militant group linked to al-Qaeda. , she told the NYT. Aden said they arrived in Lesbos on a smugglers’ boat a day earlier and spent the night hiding in the bushes before being “arrested”.

Minutes after the masked men landed them on shore, the migrants were released into the waters of the Aegean Sea on a speedboat. Another three minutes passed, and then the boat approached Coast Guard vessel 617, which was purchased primarily with European funds, according to the Greek Coast Guard’s archived assets list cited by the NYT.

One by one, the migrants disembarked from the boat and were taken to the Coast Guard vessel, accompanied by six officers.

Then, according to the New York newspaper, the Coast Guard vessel turned around and headed towards Turkey. According to Marine Traffic, the ship did not disclose its location. However, the document says he was able to approximate his position using the location of other nearby merchant ships visible in the footage she captured, such as the MSC Valencia, a large merchant ship docked nearby.

The Coast Guard vessel stopped while approaching the border of Greek territorial waters. Video taken by an Austrian activist off the coast of Lesvos is blurry due to distance, but a black object can be seen floating next to a Coast Guard vessel.

In interviews at a detention center in Izmir, all migrants described being pushed into a black inflatable lifeboat and pulled out of the water.

According to Turkish officials, the Greek authorities often send faxes to inform their Turkish counterparts about the presence of migrants in Turkish territorial waters. So, the publication says, about an hour after the escape of the migrants, two boats of the Turkish coast guard appeared, which later reported that they had rescued “12 illegal migrants in a lifeboat that the Greek forces pushed into Turkish territorial waters.” “, off the coast of Dikili, opposite Lesvos, at 14:30 local time.

The New York Times analyzed a video provided to them by the Turkish Coast Guard and was able, they say, to identify the people seen in the video and locate them in an immigration detention center in Turkey.

Source: New York Times.