Total recall

No pity, only terror in this Greek tragedyOn December 25, 1996, about 300 South Asian men, of whom 227 are believed to have been Indians, ...

No pity, only terror in this Greek tragedy

On December 25, 1996, about 300 South Asian men, of whom 227 are believed to have been Indians, died in the icy waters off the coast of Malta. They were all illegal immigrants bound for Greece. The London-based The Observer had established what happened to the people when they were being transferred mid-ocean from the liner Yiohan to a launch F174 for the last leg of their journey. The F174 went down in the Ionian sea and it was believed that it had been intentionally rammed by the Yiohan because the immigrant traffickers manning it felt the authorities were closing in on them.

The Christmas Day massacre took place at a spot sailors would recognise as 36 degrees 45 minutes N, 14 degrees 30 minutes E 8212; even sailors such as Youssef al-Halal, captain of the 1,500 tonne Yiohan, a migrant slave-ship flagged to Honduras. She had come a long and nasty way since being christened in 1964 as the Ghanaian trawler Toman, and was at that moment the subject of ayear long Interpol search. Al-Halal, born in 1958 in Lebanon and married to a Greek woman who lives in Athens, had charge of her and her human cargo, and on the night before Christmas, lying off Sicily, he was very drunk.

And sailors such as Eftychis Zervoudakis, born in the Cretan village of Sellino in 1956. His last brush with the law was when he was arrested in Glyfada in 1988 in connection with 333 kg of hashish. Now the police have a warrant for his arrest on the charge of mass murder.

Below decks in the Yiohan, in the converted tanks which had once been refrigerated to hold fish, there sat, lay and squatted between 458 and 465 would-be Asian migrants, expecting to be landed soon in Sicly, keen to end an increasingly miserable voyage. They did not like the crew, nor trust them, but had paid their money; their only choice was to rely on the likes of al-Halal, Zervoudakis and the second and third mechanics on board, Michalis Fanourakis and Andonis Sfakianakis. Within hours, more than half their numberwould have been murdered by these people.

This smuggling run was no shoestring affair. It had been well-organised, across continents, and cost them a lost of money, most were young armers who had been lured by TV as much as anything else to what they believe was a better life in the West. They were not starving at home, but they thought Europe would give them paradise, said Pakistan8217;s ambassador to Greece, Rasheer Ahmad8230;

Whether the Yiohan deliberately rammed the doomed ship, or just caught it by accident, differs according to survivors8217; testimony. The fact that the Greek authorities have issued arrest warrants for mass murder for the three Greeks involved 8212; Zervoudakis, Fanourakis and Sfakianakis, the last two of whom are thought to have been the ones holding the rifles, suggests they believe the former. But, about an hour after the transfer had begun, while those in the water still yelled for help and tried to gain the slightest handhold on either boat, the Yiohan turned in the water and its heavybow caught the F174 amidships. It sank quickly.

Story continues below this ad

8220;People cried for help,8221; said Sri Lankan survivor Kanapathi Paransothy. 8220;Some drowned because they could not swim, others were trapped inside the crashed ship and went down.8221; Only 29 of those forced off the Yiohan had made it back on board. They stood aloft, helpless, with guns still trained on them, and watched the smaller boat slip below the waves. It had, by most reckoning, 288 people on it when it went down. Some faces gazed from portholes, trapped below the water, the watchers could see, but not hear, the screams. Then, suddenly, there was nothing.

Excerpted from a two-part report, carried on January 12 and 13, 1997