Found, But Not Rescued

The migrants’ voyage, which had begun four nights earlier, on May 20, 2025, was described to me in great detail by rescue crewmembers who gathered Daniel’s testimony, along with that of others aboard the blue wooden boat, in the hours after the rescue. The voyage had begun in Libya’s coastal town of Sabratha, where two wooden boats set sail for Italy carrying 245 migrants, according to the rescuers. One of the migrant boats, carrying 128 people, was eventually rescued by the Italian Coast Guard after a civilian alarm system raised an alert.

But Daniel’s boat, carrying 117 people, was less fortunate, hitting bad weather near the Sabratha oil platform more than 60 miles off the Libyan coast.

What unfolded next — including unfinished rescue attempts by passing merchant vessels, three deaths and the return of 35 migrants to a Libyan detention center known for systemic torture — is the subject of intense legal and moral debate, drawing in multiple governments, international agencies, coast guards, NGOs and commercial shipping companies. At its heart lie serious potential violations of international human rights and refugee law.

But the deeper story is structural, rooted in decades of northbound wealth transfer, policies that facilitate unsafe migration routes and systems that drive vulnerable people into the hands of traffickers and abusers.

The 2015 launch of Operation Sophia, a European Union military operation designed to ​“disrupt human smuggling and trafficking networks,” increased surveillance on the Mediterranean Sea. But deaths at sea never stopped. Regular drones and planes from the European border agency Frontex hum over the waves, but the surveillance is geared at security, not protection. (Frontex disputes this.)

Today, Frontex does not perform rescues; instead, it uses a fleet of planes and drones to spot boats in distress. The agency’s crews radio the rescue coordination centers responsible for that stretch of sea, giving them the boats’ position, course and speed and copying neighboring centers on the same call, according to Frontex spokesman Chris Borowski.

In situations like Daniel’s, the Libyans may intercept the vessels — if they are in the Libyan search and rescue area — using boats donated by Italy. The migrants are then taken, or returned, to detention centers where survivors report widespread abuses. 

In 2025, nearly 8,000 people died or went missing on dangerous migration routes, including those spanning the Mediterranean Sea between Africa and Europe, the Atlantic Ocean from West Africa toward the Canary Islands, and the Horn of Africa toward Saudi Arabia, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). IOM also found that in the same year, ​“270 human remains washed ashore on Mediterranean coasts,” pointing to untraced shipwrecks.

So far in 2026, at least 990 people have died trying to cross the Mediterranean — far more than the same period last year — including 53 migrants lost at sea in early February, their bodies seemingly washing up on Italy’s beaches following a violent winter storm. Days before that disaster, at least 15 migrants died in Greek waters, reportedly after their boat ​“collided” with a Greek Coast Guard vessel.

The man Daniel watched drown last May might never be included in NGO tallies of the dead. But his death still poses a vital question: Why was he — and later two others from the same boat, another man and a child, according to rescuers — allowed to die while trying to reach one of the wealthiest continents on earth? These are not just tragic accidents; they are potential crimes against humanity that could be prosecuted up official chains of command.

Now, human rights lawyers are asking the International Criminal Court to investigate European leaders, alongside Libyan suspects, following the death of 25,000 asylum seekers and the abuses of 150,000 survivors detained in Libya.

Of the 117 migrants who set off from Libya on the boat with Daniel, only 79 made it to Italy — feverish, fuel-burned and in shock. But all of them — the survivors, the dead and those returned to Libya — were equally victims, not just of the sea, but of hostile migration policies.

These people ​“are the ones that we know, who have relatives back in Africa, in the Middle East, who could put the dots together,” said Fellipe Lopes, a bearded Brazilian man then working on board the Ocean Viking, a rescue ship operated by European NGO SOS Mediterranee. With emotion in his voice, Lopes recalled, ​“You see a lot of activity [on that sea] — it is such a busy route with vessels, tankers, container vessels, plus military assets in the air and sea, and yet, people continue to drop constantly.”

“There are thousands of people we don’t know about,” Lopes said, ​“because they are just missing.”

In the dark, fear of the unknown often freezes migrants, one sailor told me, and rescuers rely on this alarm at the sight of an unknown ship to help keep migrant boats at a safe distance. This is the moment when most rescues go wrong, since migrants are often so relieved that they start to celebrate — sometimes jumping up and down, inadvertently causing their ship to capsize. But fear of the unknown can also keep survivors still while translators on the rescue ship explain that they’re sending out smaller boats to meet them.

Out on the deck of the Ocean Viking after the rescues, the Mediterranean air was warm and the sea calm. It was black night but there was light from the moon. Below me was the dark sea, swirling like milky blue tea and churning frothy whirlpools against the lifeboats now launching on the port side.

Amid the hum of the generators, sloshing of seawater and clomping of rubber boots, there was an atmosphere of sad diligence and worn-down optimism, broken occasionally by levity and games. The drama and intensity of the rescues was punctuated by long hours watching the waves; groups of migrant men passed the time sleeping or smoking. The sailors washed the deck and organized food handouts, tea and hot chocolate stations, and lines for the migrants to wash and charge their phones. One morning, I watched a sailor bent down, absorbed in the task of trying to dry a soaking wet passport with a hair dryer.

In the early 1990s, Spain and Italy introduced visa requirements for North African migrants, closing a period of some fluid movement. Before the Westernled wars in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan, migration across the Mediterranean was mostly viewed in economic and not criminal terms. This shifted after the 2011 Libyan war, which ​“opened the door of Africa to Europe,” said Felippo Aquilino, another rescuer on board the Ocean Viking.

Aquilino, a Sicilian with salt-and-pepper hair, had known about the migrant route since a fishing boat full of strangers crashed outside his family’s cabin on the south coast of Lampedusa when he was five years old. He sat talking to me on the deck of the boat under bright sunshine and a strong wind. As an outpost that represents one of the nearest parts of Europe to Africa, Lampedusa has become such a symbol of the deadly Mediterranean crossing that Pope Francis famously made it the destination of his first official trip outside Rome in 2013, celebrating mass on an altar fashioned from the wood of shipwrecked migrant boats.

The day after he was rescued, Ahmed — a Marxist from Sudan who said he fled Darfur in 2019, when his political activism made him an enemy of both the government and the rebels — told me that, for him, ​“There’s no way back, because I refuse two systems, not one.” He tried to cross the sea to reach Europe five times between 2019 and 2025, but each time, he was returned by Libyan patrol boats. Sometimes, he was sent back and freed along with his fellow travellers. But on other occasions, he said, he was sent to jails where he was tortured. Once, he was forced to pay the equivalent of $310 for his freedom. After his release, militias in Misrata forced him to work as a cleaner and guard — sometimes for pay, sometimes not, in a mix of indentured servitude and slavery.

Sitting on the deck of the Ocean Viking and looking out at the sea, a metal cross round his neck, another migrant named Josef described leaving Ethiopia’s city of Gondar because he couldn’t find work or money. In Libya, he’d been captured and sent to jail four times: twice for trying to cross the sea and twice just for being on the street. In jail, he said, he’d been kicked ​“like an animal” by guards until he could gather the bribe money to escape.

Sitting with the women and children outside their sleeping quarters, Helen, a young woman with a mournful air, said she was traveling with her husband. She was tired and withdrawn and didn’t join in when the other women sang and danced on deck with relief. The couple traveled from Ethiopia to Sudan and then Libya, where her husband took menial work. ​“Sometimes,” Helen recalled, the militia men ​“took him away, kidnapped him, and asked for money to release him.” The first time she tried to cross the sea, Libyans shot at their plastic boat and forced them off. ​“The men jumped in the water and the women cried, ​‘Our brothers, please help get them.’” The men were rescued and then beaten by the guards.

The second time, she was at sea for 12 hours before being captured and taken back to a prison in Libya, where she was held for nine months. She didn’t have words to describe how bad the treatment was there; when I asked about it, her eyes filled with tears and she began to rock back and forth.

From Sfax, we headed to northern Italy, more than 600 miles away, to disembark the survivors under orders from Italian maritime authorities. After four days sailing together, I watched as the migrants stepped down from the boat, many without shoes or socks, to meet a delegation of local officials, the Italian Red Cross and the police. From here, they would start the next part of their journeys. A month later, Ahmed met the photographer I was traveling with, Ali, in Paris. Ahmed had walked all the way to France, crossing the Alps, with the help of kind strangers who treated his worn-out feet and bad stomach. 

Frontex spokesman Chris Borowski said in response to inquiries from In These Times: ​“Detection is what starts the rescue. In 2025, Frontex assets contributed to saving 33,000 lives, and we’re past 7,000 already this year. … On the interception chain and non-refoulment: we comply with non-refoulment in everything we do, full stop.”

(Non-refoulement is a core principle under international human rights law prohibiting states from returning a person to a territory where they face real risks of persecution or irreparable harm.)

Borowski added: ​“When one of our aircraft finds a boat that’s about to sink, the job in that moment is to stop people from drowning. Saving those lives has to come first, because the alternative is watching people drown while everyone works out the politics. What a government does after an interception, Italy, Libya, or anyone else, is a separate and serious question, but it doesn’t change the fact that reporting a boat in distress is what keeps the people on it alive long enough for that question to even come up.”

“I don’t dispute that the reports of torture and extortion in Libyan detention are real and well documented. But the fix for that isn’t asking Frontex to stop reporting boats in distress, a duty every vessel at sea carries,” Borowski said. ​“It’s a decision on the political level. That call isn’t ours to make, and we won’t speak as though it is.”

A medic on board the Sumud Flotilla that sailed towards Gaza in September 2025 recalled watching Frontex drones with his fellow crewmembers. While the drones only monitor migrant traffic, the sheer number of them was disconcerting, said the medic, speaking on the condition of anonymity. The constant air surveillance ​“felt intimidating and dystopian,” he added.

In 2017, the Italian government began introducing rules limiting the operations of NGO ships, followed by new laws carrying penalties in 2019, and further restrictions during the pandemic. Under mounting pressure from the far Right, Italy enacted the ​“Piantedosi Decree” in 2023. Named after Interior Minister Matteo Piantedosi, the law imposed strict new limitations on NGO rescue operations, requiring vessels to head immediately to the port designated by authorities after every rescue and making ​“multi-rescue” missions much harder. That has the effect of reducing the time rescuers can spend at sea answering distress calls, driving up costs and increasing the likelihood of criminalization if paperwork is not filed correctly. Ships are now regularly detained for conducting additional rescues after being assigned a port of disembarkation.

Far-right politicians began to denigrate NGO operators as ​“sea taxis” or accomplices to smugglers, said the Ocean Viking’s Aquilino. This criminalization is a key vector in Europe’s broader hostility to migrants from countries destabilized by corruption, repression and Western-backed wars and economic policies.

The impact on operations has been huge. Before the war against NGO ships began, Aquilino said, the Ocean Viking spent roughly 300 days a year patrolling for distressed boats; under the Piantedosi Decree, that has dropped to 180 days. It was a sad irony that a year after the EU received the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize for decades of contributions to peace, democracy and human rights worldwide, ​“they started closing the borders and stopping the rescues,” he added.

After the EU signed a deal with Turkey in 2016 to reduce migration, Ocean Viking crewmember Lopes said there was a sudden increase in the number of Frontex personnel, boats, airplanes, drones and bases around Lesbos, the Greek island off Turkey that had become the epicenter of migrant arrivals to Europe. In 2015, when Kurdish-Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi washed up drowned on a Turkish beach, global attention turned to Lesbos and the NGO presence on the island soared. Frontex personnel filled restaurants, along with members of the Greek Coast Guard and army. States began arresting humanitarian activists. The crackdown in Greek-Turkish waters, said Lopes, made the far more dangerous Central Mediterranean route, one of the deadliest in the world, much more popular.

The EU, the Italian foreign ministry, the Maltese maritime authorities, the Italian Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre and the Libyan Maritime Rescue Coordination Centre did not respond to requests for comment from In These Times, nor did Israeli Aerospace Industry or Airbus.

As Daniel’s boat drifted away from the drowning man, the crew of a large merchant ship trying to rescue them sent an urgent mayday signal about possible people in the water, requesting assistance and guidance on what to do with the 35 people they had managed to rescue before the migrant boat pulled away.

The merchant vessel, the MV Bobic, registered in the Marshall Islands, turned south to Libya to return the rescued migrants. The NGO Alarm Phone, which relays messages to rescue boats and authorities from shipwrecked migrants, informed the merchant ship that it was illegal to return migrants to Libya, where there is a credible risk of torture and abuse. A deputy commissioner of maritime affairs for the Republic of the Marshall Islands suggested the merchant vessel go to Tunisia, then asked Libya to take responsibility for the decision, according to emails published by Alarm Phone.

Merchant ships operate on strict margins and any rescue will cost crucial days sailing time for the captain and ship’s company. That evening, a relative of one of the rescued migrants told Alarm Phone that the 35 people who made it onboard the Bobic had been taken to Libya’s al-Nasr detention center in Zawiyah, notorious for torture.

The Ocean Viking was on its way, but was still returning from dropping off migrants shipwrecked near Tunisia — including Ahmed, Josef and Helen, whom I’d met — in northern Italy. If it hadn’t been compelled to drop them off first, as the new regulations dictated, it could have been closer to Daniel’s boat and more people may have survived.

On May 25, 2025, the evening after the MV Bobic rescue, another merchant ship, the MV Eco One, approached the 81 migrants, including Daniel, still adrift. The Eco One was roughly six times the size of their boat, but the survivors were so exhausted and scared of the bruising storm that they apparently lost fear of other threats and bravely tried to approach the ship’s colossal, metal hull.

The crew of the Eco One threw down a small rope with a ring at the end. The migrants rushed to climb aboard, and in the scrum, four people fell into the water, Daniel told the Ocean Viking’s crew. The Eco’s crew threw life rings down into the swell to catch the fallen. Two survivors were pulled from the water and hauled back onto the wooden boat, but the other two — one man of around 25 and a child of 13 — were too far away, according to Daniel’s account.

“We [sailed] away from the second ship as we saw too many people falling down. We were scared because of what happened with the rope. Everyone went for themselves,” Daniel told the Ocean Viking crew.

During the rescue attempt, the crew of the Eco One managed to recover 26 people from the boat before aborting the rescue due to the storm. The Italian maritime authorities then told the Eco One to take the survivors to Lampedusa and rescue the remaining shipwrecked people once weather conditions allowed. The Ocean Viking, then about an hour away, also received the order.

Neither the deputy commissioner of maritime affairs for the Republic of the Marshall Islands nor the management companies of the MV Bobic and Eco One responded to requests for comment.

At this point, Daniel and his fellow migrants still caught in the storm saw what could be another ship in the distance — possibly an oil rig resupply vessel, its deck lit up like a Christmas tree, so bright that ​“it blinded us,” according to Daniel. They called out to the ship, asking anyone on board to help them, but ​“no one listened,” he recalled. He went down below deck into the cramped hold and tried not to think about the storm, or the juddering prow threatening to break, or the lack of fuel, or the sick passengers.

When the Ocean Viking approached Daniel’s boat, it was midnight and the sea was black. A video of the rescue shows a headlamp jutting over bouncing, black waves, until the lights of the oil tanker that had passed by appeared in the distance. In the foreground is the tiny migrant boat, spinning on the swell.

The Ocean Viking rescuers couldn’t see anyone out on deck, but as they drew closer, a man shouted out, ​“there are more of us down below.”

As the Ocean Viking’s lifeboats finally reached the skiff, Aquilino noticed a strong smell of diesel. Many of the passengers were in various states of shock, he said, and most of them were sheltering below deck in the space filled with water. The women below deck ​“were not okay,” said Lopes.

The next day, he recalled seeing one woman whose eyes were rolling back in her head. ​“She was not there,” Lopes said. Aquilino described a woman who had fallen in the water as appearing to have just come ​“back from the dead.” In the aftermath of the rescue, she cried out for her brother, who may have been one of the men who drowned, according to Aquilino. The survivors were so traumatized that it was difficult for the rescuers to understand exactly what happened. 

When Italian authorities control a rescue at sea, West said, this can be enough ​“to establish the co-perpetration” of crimes against humanity, provided migrants are subsequently pushed back to Libyan detention sites, where some become victims of enforced disappearances. Because these disappearances occur with the direct knowledge or acquiescence of state authorities, West added, ​“they also impose a number of positive obligations on states to search for, to investigate and to continue until the whereabouts of the person are actually found and known.”

In an October 2025 submission to the International Criminal Court, a group of lawyers accused 120 European leaders of committing crimes against humanity alongside Libyan suspects. Following a similar attempt six years earlier, the submission names the European officials as co-perpetrators in the deaths of 25,000 asylum seekers, as well as abuses against some 150,000 survivors ​“abducted and forcibly transferred to Libya, where they were detained, tortured, raped, and enslaved.”

Now, even the rescuers are coming under attack. Humanitarian vessels threaten the financial and logistical arrangements between the EU and Libya. For the militias running Libyan detention centers, these ships undermine the cyclical business model of extortion. West describes the violence directed at rescue boats as ​“a maritime front of this broader containment policy.”

In August 2025, the Ocean Viking came under heavy machine gun fire, reportedly from Libyan forces sailing a vessel gifted by Italy. The attack destroyed the Viking’s antennas, broke four windows and damaged three rescue boats and rescue equipment, grounding the ship and stopping all rescues for about four months. Aquilino, on board at the time, said the gunfire was intense. He heard the metallic clink of bullets hitting the roof, windows and doors of the bridge.

“We were all falling down on the floor,” he said, hiding and ​“waiting for it to finish.”