A Cameroonian asylum seeker accuses the Greek coast guard of having thrown him into the sea with two other men who died of drowning. These drownings took place in the Aegean Sea, during a pushback operation to neighboring Turkey, off the Greek island of Samos, in September 2021. The information was confirmed by several European media including Mediapart.
With our correspondent in Greece, Joel Bronner
“ We are in mourning today. There are two brothers who drowned. They’re dead, they’ve come this far : they were up there, up there ! They were three. Two drowned and one returned to Turkey. »
In September, on the Greek island of Samos, this asylum seeker from Cameroon got her information from one of her compatriots. At the time, the information is not immediately verifiable.
Denied reality
She talks about these people who arrived on the island, a stone’s throw from the refugee camp where she lives, then their brutal refoulement, without having been able to file an asylum application, contrary to international conventions: “ These people, they were next to the camp… Why are they bad like that ? The human being is a human being, even to the animal, we don’t do that ! They drowned, they had no life jackets. How you can throw people without even giving the vest ? »
In Greece, despite the accumulation of testimonies, reports, reports, and despite, as in this case, the presence of corpses, the reality of the refoulements is almost systematically denied.
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