The masked smugglers had locked the 359 migrants - including 42 women and 62 children - below deck in pens that looked like jail cells. They contacted the ship by radio, and the woman who answered in English said she couldn’t turn off the engines because the smugglers had wrecked the controls before leaving. It was tearing along at a speed of 9 knots on choppy seas whipped up by gale-force winds - with nobody at the controls. Halldor Nellett knew there was no way to board the Sierra Leone-flagged freighter. But when it reached the stricken ship just after dark, Capt.

The Icelandic cutter Tyr was 20 miles (30 kilometers) away. “They were like me, refugees.”īut when a cattle freighter named the Ezadeen put out a distress call on New Year’s Eve, it didn’t even have a makeshift crew of migrants. Even the crew, they weren’t the crew,” said Moutassem Yazbek, a Syrian who was rescued from a cargo ship by Frontex in December.

That means that the traffickers can remain safely ashore. One of the smugglers’ latest innovations is to select refugees with seafaring experience and put them in charge of the ship - offering them a steep discount in exchange for navigating. They will give everything that they have and risk their lives.” “These people have no future and often the only option they have is to leave. “We shall be seeing a lot more of these ships,” Corabatir said. In Turkey alone, more than 1 million Syrians are fending for themselves without jobs or basic services - many of them doctors or lawyers who can afford to pay thousands of dollars for a cargo ship berth, said Metin Corabatir, who heads the Ankara-based Research Center on Asylum and Migration.

The cargo ship method is not likely to go away any time soon because of high demand. Frontex spokeswoman Izabella Cooper said one vessel that arrived in Italy recently appeared to have been bought online from a scrapyard. The EU border agency Frontex says about 15 cargo ships smuggling asylum-seekers have tried to reach Europe since August. A crisis in merchant shipping has left a glut of cargo ships on the market, with low demand depressing prices and making an aging vessel particularly affordable to criminal gangs, said a Greek merchant marine ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. Buying a cargo ship is a lot easier and cheaper than it used to be.

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