The 44-year-old port authority official who fired shots last Friday at a speedboat smuggling migrants near the southeastern Aegean island of Symi, which led to the death of a 39-year-old Kuwaiti national, has testified that it was in response to their repeated attempts to ram the Greek patrol boat.
The incident occurred during a pursuit of the speedboat by the port authority patrol boat. The traffickers were transporting migrants from Turkey to Symi. The speedboat’s Turkish operators did not comply with the patrol boat and instead executed dangerous maneuvers, attempting to ram the patrol vessel.
“It was deemed necessary to use the rules of engagement and two warning shots were fired in a safe area (…) The operator of the boat continued to come at us without complying with the sole purpose of sinking us (…) Two aimed shots were fired on the motor in order to stop it, as they did,” the 44-year-old testified, adding that the migrants were lying on the floor and it was not easy to distinguish them from a distance.
Two Turkish nationals aged 24 and 16 were arrested as the traffickers.
They are accused, among other things, of illegally bringing illegal migrants into the country and exposing them to danger, and are due to appear before a prosecutor on Wednesday. In their pre-trial testimonies, one of them pleaded ignorance, claiming that he was involved in transporting tourists and not illegal migration.
“I thought they were tourists for a ride to the Turkish beaches,” he testified.
The second one said that he has six pending cases in Turkey for drug trafficking and that he paid 4,500 euros to come to Greece.
However, he pointed to two other people as the speedboat operators, including the 39-year-old Kuwaiti national who was fatally injured.
“In the beginning someone was driving whose name I don’t know but he is the one who was later shot,” he claimed.
A Palestinian migrant who was in the speedboat said in his testimony that the two operators “took turns steering the boat and kept telling us to ‘duck down’ …while we were approaching the Greek coast I heard a shot and then I realized that we were being chased by a Greek port boat. I paid 4,500 euros for my transport to Greece,” he said.