The PPS 920 did not have sufficient life-saving equipment or a doctor; its crew consisted of thirteen people, four of whom were from the Special Missions Unit. By the time it reached the scene, the Operations Centre was ordering two merchant ships alongside to provide food and water to the refugees, but not to rescue the people in distress. And then they released them to avoid witnesses, leaving the PPLS 920 alone there to tow the refugee boat to Italy.

The tow caused the capsize and the sinking. Only then did the Coastguard issue a MAYDAY. Starting the rescue operation of the castaways at least half an hour later. As a result, most of them drowned. What they did was a murderous pushback, not a rescue.

They are also drowning the truth

This truth of the atrocious crime was a long battle to come to light. From the very first moment, the government of the party of new Democracy tried to drown it out along with the refugees. The shipwreck happened between the two May-June 2023 elections. Three days after the shipwreck, PM Mitsotakis in an election speech in Gythio - the same place where the Aigaion Pelagos was grounded - personally gave the ‘guideline’:

The culprits were ‘the wretched traffickers, those scoundrels who trade in human suffering’. The rescuers were the Coastguard who ‘made a commendable effort to save hundreds of people’. As for those who talked about state crime, they were irresponsible for ‘taking the opportunity to denounce - in effect - their own country and the Coastguard.’ And he repeated the same a few months later, in November 2023, in an interview with the BBC.

Practically this translated into an unprecedented bungle, as in Tempe(2). And it would have succeeded, if he had not found in these two years the survivors and the families of the victims themselves, the great movement of solidarity with the refugees and the anti-racist movement as a whole, the migrant and refugee communities, the labour and youth movement, the whole of the left.

A first central front was not to bury the testimonies of the survivors and all evidence of the criminal actions of the Coastguard throughout the incident. At this level, the state apparatus did its best to eliminate any trace of what happened.

It locked the survivors first in a warehouses in Kalamata and then in the Malakasa camp under detention for ‘illegal entry’. They imposed a stranglehold on their communication with the media, party delegations and humanitarian organisations - even with their relatives, resulting in photographs of shameful siblings hugging each other through the bars.

They confiscated their mobile phones as soon as he picked them up from the sea and made them disappear. They began questioning them a few hours after the sinking, while they were still wet, barefoot, in shock from what they had been through and the loss of their fellow human beings. They illegally put them through an accelerated asylum process, rejecting a large number and threatening them with deportation.

At the same time, the Coast Guard headquarters denied that the towage that caused the sinking of the refugee boat took place. Initially, it even denied that it had been moored with a rope. They then admitted that there was a rope tie-up, but never a tow. They also shamelessly announced that the cameras and all the recording systems of the PPLS 920 were out of order that day due to... technical failure.

The first who succeeded to break the wall of silence were the survivors themselves. Despite imprisonment, isolation, threats and pressure from the state authorities, they began to denounce the tow, but also what followed: the delayed rescue, the confiscation of their belongings, the tampering with their statements, and the interpreter who in many cases was involved.

WDR's envoy to Greece, Bamdad Esmaili, said at the time: "Last night my colleague, who speaks Arabic, managed to talk to about ten surviving refugees. Independently of each other they reported that they had indeed pulled this boat - not just once, not just twice, but three times in total. And in the process, the boat began to rock and sank."

"They asked me how the boat sank. I told them that the Greek Coast Guard caused it. There was an interpreter who told me not to say that in front of the police. I did not change my statement. The Greek police said: 'Maybe you are saying this because you are under psychological pressure, so you don't know what to say. You are traumatised'. So I was scared and I didn't say anything else. And they didn't include that in the final statement," one of the survivors told a major media inquiry at the time, which also reported: ‘In one deposition, the person asked to translate into English for a Syrian survivor stated his occupation as “port agent”.’

Against the cover-up

The mass demonstrations on the day after the shipwreck all over the country - from Pylos, Athens and Ioannina to Alexandroupolis and Samos - played a decisive role in making these testimonies public. The survivors had a movement on their side and this gave them the strength and confidence to bring the real killers out into the open.

And this continued in the following months. "The moment they tied the rope, I filmed it myself. M.'s mobile phone went missing, the police took it. They took it in Kalamata. He asked to get it back and they said “we didn't take anything from you”," one of the complaints said at the time. Only like that, almost a month later, twenty-one smart phone devices were ‘suddenly’ found in the hands of the crew of the PPLS-920, forgotten in a plastic bag... And it is a battle to this day to open them, against the investigating authorities who refused to examine them to recover their data because they ‘got water’.

No matter how hard the government tried, the case was not forgotten. The mobilizations and actions continued. KEERFA was at the centre of the battle. It called and organized the big demonstrations in Athens and all the cities.

KEERFA worked with the survivors' lawyers and took initiatives for mobilizations and protests at the Piraeus Maritime Court and the Ministry of Migration and Asylum. KEERFA held press conferences, concerts and organised numerous rounds of events in workplaces, schools and neighbourhoods.

The campaign won decisions of support from trade unions and student associations. Successfully, KEERFA connected with the families of victims in Pakistan, Egypt and Syria, helped them organize and demand justice. KEERFA tried to spread the struggle internationally, from Europe to the US. It strengthened the movement politically, highlighting the murderous nature of Fortress Europe's racist policies and closed borders.

All of this enabled step by step the challenges to be crushed and the cover-up to be broken.

Just three months later, in September 2023, the first 53 survivors filed their lawsuits in the Piraeus Maritime Court against all those responsible, a crucial step to pave the way for the guilty to be punished.

In December 2023, the joint report of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch was published, which was a hell of a report on the coastguard. With interviews from 21 survivors, 5 relatives of 5 missing persons, representatives of the Coast Guard and the Greek Police, non-governmental organizations, the UN and international bodies and organizations, and having collected and studied all the evidence available until then, the report confirmed the accusations against the Coast Guard for causing a shipwreck and not rescuing the refugees, but also for undermining the judicial investigation and attempting to cover up.

Only through the action of the movement could the lawyers of the survivors in the year since the shipwreck now present the full and detailed chronicle of the crime - a shocking record of how the coastguard came to murder over 600 people.

The acquittal of the nine

A second major front, directly linked to the first, was the battle to prevent the conviction of the nine Egyptian survivors on whom the government attempted to pin the crime. To undermine the frame-up that was set up against them to support the traffickers' narrative.

All of them were selected at random, in the pile, a few hours after the shipwreck, from the hospital where they were still being treated in a miserable psychological and physical condition. They were charged with trafficking, causing a shipwreck and forming a criminal organisation and sent to prison for a year, facing sentences of several hundred years each.

The campaign for their acquittal lasted several months. A key moment was the filing of the charges in the Maritime Court, as it broke the government propaganda that the nine were the guilty ones. Another significant moment was the participation of survivors, mainly from Pakistan, in the demonstration for the World Day of Action against racism and fascists in March 2024. There, with PYLOS SURVIVORS bandanas on their heads, they demanded the release of the nine.

The campaign culminated on the eve of the trial that took place in Kalamata in May 2024. Thousands participated in the concert organized by KEERFA in Rouf with the central demand that the charges against them be dropped, and that the real culprits, the government and the coast guard, go to trial and sentencing. The concert enabled a large number of artists to express themselves and join the solidarity movement, and a number of other struggles against the government to join this battle.

The breadth of the forces that had already been won by the struggle of Pylos was shown outside the court in Kalamata: the Prefectural Department of ADEDY in Messinia, the SEPE of Messinia, the Trade Union of Private Employees and the Union of Pensioners of IKA-EFKA of Messinia, health workers, employees of the Municipality and the Region, construction workers, etc. Also the Antifascist Movement of Kalamata, one of the main organizers of the demonstration along with other local collectives, the delegation of KEERFA and the SEK from Athens, militants of ANTARSYA and other organizations of the Left.

This made possible the acquittal and release of the nine, a great first victory in the struggle for justice. Which was celebrated wildly not only on the same day in Kalamata but also in the demonstration that followed in June 2024 for the one year anniversary of the shipwreck.

In Athens, the survivors, including the acquitted, marched together. At the same time, in the Pakistani city of Lalamusa, the committee of the victims' families was proceeding with a mass gathering of remembrance and struggle, launching a series of mobilizations in the coming months in Islamabad and elsewhere.

But also all over Europe, survivors of the shipwreck who had meanwhile fled to other European capitals took to the streets along with anti-racist organisations and collectives with actions and demonstrations, expressing their joy at the news of the acquittal of the nine and reiterating their demand that the real culprits go to jail.

Trial and sentencing of the killers

A third front, which intensified after the solemn acquittal of the nine, was to move forward with the judicial investigation in the Maritime Court that had been stuck for months at the preliminary examination stage. And this became a matter for the mass movement with events, performances, protests.

Some of these took place outside the Ministry Migration and Asylum in the fall of 2024, when the survivors' appeals against the rejection of their asylum applications were being considered. But also at the Maritime Court on the day additional survivors' lawsuits - including those of the nine acquitted - were filed.

These were important initiatives because the government and the Coast Guard had not given up on the cover-up. This was evident in December 2024 when the preliminary investigation was attempted to be closed without calling the Coast Guard officers who handled the incident to explain themselves and without including their communications and other important evidence in the case file.
This was overturned under a new combination of mobilisations and revelations. The KEERFA concert at the Architecture last January was even bigger, with thousands resolutely demanding the punishment of the guilty. While the organization of a large demonstration at the Maritime Court immediately afterwards coincided with the publication of the Greek Ombudsman report. As much as the government and the Ministry of Shipping glared and thundered against the findings of the Independent Authority, the Maritime Court was forced to summon for explanations the members of the leadership of the Coast Guard that the Greek Ombudsman found accountable for serious criminal offences.

The revelations at the same time by the newspaper ‘Papers of the Editors’(www.efsyn.gr) and omniatv with the audio conversations of the same executives on the day of the shipwreck, further tightened the noose around them. What they showed was that the cover-up operation had begun at the time the crime was committed - with the port officials trying at all costs not to save the refugees but to get it on record that they wanted to continue their journey to Italy.

‘Tempi - Pylos, a common struggle’

The demand to punish the culprits was given greater impetus by the strike explosion of 28 February over the Tempi. The presence of KEERFA with the slogan ‘Tempi - Pylos, common struggle’ strengthened the connection. Something that was expressed even more strongly in the big anti-racist-anti-fascist demonstration on 22 March at Syntagma. There the relatives of the victims of Tempi joined their voice with the relatives of the victims of Pylos, highlighting that the government is murdering either with privatisations or with racism.

The government's latest desperate attempt to save the leadership of the Coast guard was the elevation of one of those directly involved in the crime, Tryphon Kontizas, to Chief of the Coast guard. It was an open intervention in the judiciary, but it failed to prevent the prosecution of the 17 coastguardsmen who are being referred for questioning. Kontizas and three other senior officers may not be among them, but the matter is not closed. The survivors have already announced through their lawyers that they will appeal against the decision that puts the case of the four senior officers on file.

This comes at a time when the June 21 rallies to mark the two-year anniversary of the crime are coming up. With victories, but also with new challenges for the anti-racist movement.

Because the battle to bring the 17 to trial and conviction is not over, on the contrary, it is now opening. Because the entire operational and political leadership must sit in the dock with them. And why the government that places the axe-wielding Voridis in Immigration and prepares new Pylos crimes must be overthrown. With the power of the movement that has not left it on a bare branch, we are escalating to finish it off.

Lena Verde, article in Workers Solidarity, newspaper, 11/06/2025, No 1676