On 14 June 2023, Adriana, an Italy-bound fishing trawler smuggling migrants, sank in international waters in the part of the Mediterranean known as the Ionian Sea, off the coast of Pylos, Messenia, Greece. The boat had a capacity of 400 people, but was carrying an estimated 400 to 750 migrants, mostly from Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and some from Afghanistan. After departing from Tobruk, Libya, on 10 June, concerns were raised by 13 June, with the vessel then located in the Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) zone assigned to Greece. The Hellenic Coast Guard (HCG) helicopter and later the HCG vessel ΠΠΛΣ-920 arrived on scene, took aerial photos of the vessel, made offers of assistance that were allegedly refused, then by some accounts remained there as an observer until the boat capsized and sank, despite calm weather conditions. After Adriana had sunk "close to the deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea", the HCG and the military initiated a massive search and rescue operation. One hundred and four men were rescued, and 82 bodies were recovered. By 18 June, officials had acknowledged that over 500 people were "presumed dead."
By July 2023, investigations by the BBC, the New York Times, The Guardian, German public broadcaster ARD/NDR/Funk and Greek investigative outlet Solomon, together with research agency Forensis research groupa sister organisation of Forensic Architecture cast doubts on the original reports by the HCG. Based on survivors' interviews, court documents, and sources from the coastguards they found evidence suggesting that the HCG ship may have caused the overcrowded vessel to capsize while attempting to tow it, which HCG denies. The HCG said it was caused by a "commotion" on the vessel. When Adriana capsized and sank shortly after 2:00 AM (EEST), the only vessel present was the HCG vessel ΠΠΛΣ-920 manned by a team that included four armed special operations coast guards wearing masks.
The European Ombudsman is investigating accusations that European Union (EU) border protection agency, Frontex, and the HCG did not take preventative steps to avoid the shipwreck. By a year after the disaster, both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch had criticized the slow progress of official investigations.
Background
Although the European migrant crisis had reached a peak in 2015, the European Union Agency for Law Enforcement Cooperation (Europol) reported in 2018 that there were at least 65,000 migrant smugglers being tracked in the booming illegal trade, which had become one of the "fastest growing forms of international organised crime." The people-smuggling business developed as a result of Libya's ongoing crisis, alongside instability in neighboring countries, with Libya becoming a hub for moving migrants and refugees across the Mediterranean into Europe. According to a February 2023 International Organization for Migration (IOM) report, there were over 706,062 migrants representing 44 nationalities in a hundred Libyan municipalities and the numbers continue to rise.
The 2022–2023 Pakistani economic crisis hampered Pakistan's ability to import essential food products, and forced Pakistani people to seek opportunities abroad.
The IOM declared the Northern Africa to Italy sea route for migrants and refugees seeking to get to Europe as the deadliest on earth, which has recorded 21,000 deaths since 2014. Human smugglers crowd migrants into unseaworthy vessels, often in locked holds for days-long journeys.
According to the BBC, in 2023 most migrants and refugees land in Italy because it is closer to Western Europe than Greece.
Such maritime smuggling routes into Europe have seen an increasing number of fatal incidents: 3,800 people died in 2022 while traversing migrant and refugee routes from the Middle East and North Africa, of whom 3,789 died on sea-based routes in and around the region. On 26 February 2023, at least 94 people died when a wooden boat from İzmir, Turkey, sank off Cutro in Southern Italy in the deadliest Mediterranean maritime incident of 2023 up to that point.
Since 2015, when the stream of Middle Eastern, Asian, and African migrants and refugees attempting to enter European Union nations reached its height, Greece became the "main thoroughfare". Greek authorities have argued that the number of newly arrived migrants places a "disproportionate burden" on them. Shortly after the Pylos shipwreck, a spokesperson from the Greek migration ministry told the BBC that he wanted a European Union migration policy that accepted migrants who were in need, not just those who can afford to pay smugglers.
With the election of the center-right New Democracy party leader, Kyriakos Mitsotakis as prime minister in 2019 the country took a "harder line" against the tens of thousands of asylum seekers in Greeceoften Syrian war refugees.
Since 2015, with hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers attempting to enter the European Union member states, the word "pushback" entered the EU lexicon. In the 2021 report of the UN Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants, Felipe González Morales defined pushbacks as "measures, actions or policies effectively resulting in the removal of migrants, individually or in groups, without an individualized assessment in line with human rights obligations and due process guarantees. According to a 19 July 2023 article by the German public broadcaster, Deutsche Welle (DW), pushbacks had "become so so systematic, they are de facto policy." In 2021, Amnesty International has said that Greece has used pushbacks as their "de facto border policy" to discourage asylum seekers.
A July 2023 BBC article about the deadly Pylos shipwreck said that there was an increase in international attention to pushbacks in Greece following the New York Times 19 May release of video footage taken on Lesbos, Greece, where 12 asylum seekers, including an infant, were forced into a van, taken by speedboat to a HCG vessel, transferred to an inflatable raft in the Aegean Sea, then abandoned at sea under the hot sun.
A BBC article from June 2024 alleges that the Greek coastguard has, on occasion, purposefully forced people out of territorial waters, even after individuals have reached the Greek islands. Over the course of 2020 to 2023, 15 incidences resulting in 43 deaths occurred. Migrants alleged that the coastguard physically threw them overboard.
Timeline
The migrant boat, Adriana
The Italy-bound "rusted, aging", overloaded migrant boat was a fishing trawler, named Adriana, that was estimated to be around long. The Greek newspaper, Kathimerini, had reported on 9 June that smugglers had to convince apprehensive migrants to get on board a boat they thought was incapable of making "the more-than-five-hundred-nautical-mile journey" with hundreds of passengers. It had departed from Tobruk, a city in Cyrenaica, Libya, south of the Greek island of Crete, on 10 June 2023. According to one estimate the boat had the capacity to carry at most 400 people, but could have been carrying up to 750 people including men, women, and children. According to a PBS Newshour report, traffickers charged each passenger US$4,500, which meant that the traffickers could have potentially made more than US$3 million. Aerial photos showing the boat's overladen upper and lower decks were taken by the HCG hours before the boat capsized.
Initially, the IOM estimated that around 400 were aboard. Ioannis Zafiropoulos, the deputy mayor of the Greek port city of Kalamata, stated that there were over 500.
No one on board had a life jacket. The Washington Post reported after the tragedy that rescue ship best practice includes the distribution of life jackets via smaller boats.
Distress calls and response At 9:55 a.m. (EEST) on Tuesday, 13 June, Nawal Soufi, an activist posted on Twitter (now X), that the fishing vessel Adriana was in distress. She wrote, "At this moment I was told by the group of migrants on board the boat in distress with 750 people that 6 people are dead and two others are in critical condition. I hope from the bottom of my heart to be proven wrong by someone." Her second tweet included the coordinates of the fishing boat. According to the Refugee Support Aegean (RSA), this was the first public announcement of the fishing boat's distress.
Alarm Phone, a European rescue-support charity had also received a distress callthe person calling said that there were about 750 people on board. Alarm Phone reported that the passengers were saying that the captain had abandoned the ship.
At 11:00 a.m. (EEST) on 13 June, the Italian coast guard alerted Greek authorities and the European Union (EU) border protection agency, Frontex, of the vessel in distress and also told the HCG that there were two dead children on board, according to the RSA. The Italian authorities informed the HCG of the peculiar movements of the vessel. The HCG said that Frontex aircraft and two merchant ships detected the vessel approaching north at high speeds, prompting the dispatch of more aircraft and vessels. Offers for aid were made to the ship but were refused according to the HCG.
The Coast Guard claimed in official statements that the boat and its passengers had refused assistance because its destination was Italy, and so its boats had hung back.
In the afternoon, one of the merchant ships approached Adriana and offered it assistance; the passengers refused it. Another merchant ship later did the same and received the same response. A HCG patrol approached the deck of the vessel in the evening, where they confirmed the presence of a large number of migrants. The migrants again refused any aid, stating that they wished to continue to Italy. In all three instances, the migrants stated that they wanted food and water, which the Greek patrol ship and a Maltese-flagged merchant ship provided. The Greek patrol later accompanied the vessel.
According to audio leaked in February 2025, an officer from the Greek rescue coordination centre instructed Adriana to tell the captain of an approaching ship, Lucky Sailor, that the migrants' destination was Italy, not Greece. When the captain of Lucky Sailor later communicated with the same rescue coordination centre he informed a coordination officer that the migrants had screamed that they wanted to go to Italy, not Greece, after which the coordination officer twice asked the captain to write that information in the ship's log. The Greek coastguard did not comment on the leaked conversations.
Capsizing At around 1:40 a.m. (EEST) on 14 June, the HCG learned that Adriana engine had broken down. After receiving a plea for aid, HCG officers then approached the ship. They stated that they then "saw the boat take a right turn, then a sharp left, and then another right so big that it caused the vessel to capsize." (Later the HCG said that they had used one rope during their assessment of the situation, some two hours before the ship capsized.) Around 10 to 15 minutes later, Adriana sank, sending its passengers into the waves of the Ionian Sea. Survivors of the shipwreck have stated that a HCG vessel caused the fishing boat to capsize by attempting to tow it at dangerously high speeds, despite passengers' cries of distress to stop. Survivors have also stated that during their ensuing interrogations they were advised by interrogators not to discuss the boat having been towed, and that reports from individual interrogations reading word-for-word identically would suggest that their testimonies were altered. The ship sank around off the coast of Pylos, Messenia, in the Peloponnese, in an area around deep, which has been described as being near the "deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea".
Search, rescue, and detention