Airborne Complicity

Credit Border Forensics. Flight Information Region (FIR) is the area for which a country is responsible for providing basic levels of air traffic service.

One Day in the Central Mediterranean

July 30, 2021, was a busy day in the Mediterranean, fairly typical of the summer months, when weather and sea conditions favor crossings. The sea and skies were full. At least six boats were carrying migrants and refugees on the water, according to a Frontex database, but testimony and flight track analysis we collected suggest there were even more. From what we can tell, Abu Laila’s boat—a two-deck motorboat with about 80 people—and those of three other men we spoke with don’t appear in official interception logs. Three ships from nongovernmental organizations were patrolling in international waters off the Libyan coast: Sea-Watch 3 (SW3), operated by Sea-Watch ; the Ocean Viking, operated by SOS MEDITERRANEE; and the Nadir, operated by RESQSHIP. Numerous merchant vessels and supply ships were transiting the central Mediterranean.

Based on data from independent aerial tracking services, at least five planes and a drone were patrolling the skies that day. The Heron drone had been flying since early morning over the western part of the Libyan search-and-rescue area—its regular beat—while a piloted plane, which has been flying missions for both Frontex and the EU naval mission EUNAVFOR MED, was patrolling to the east of Malta and Misrata, Libya. Later in the day, an Italian Guardia di Finanza plane flew over the stretch of sea separating Tunisia from the Italian island of Lampedusa.

The Armed Forces of Malta also had two planes in the air, but their role, as well as that of other surveillance aircraft that regularly fly in the area, remains unclear as their flight tracks are not publicly available. The Seabird, flown by a group called Humanitarian Pilots Initiative in partnership with Sea-Watch, was also patrolling—the only civilian aircraft dedicated to spotting migrant boats in distress.

According to the flight tracks, the Frontex Heron drone was the first of these aircraft to take off from its base in Malta’s Luqa airport. Operated by ADAS, a subsidiary of Airbus, it is piloted from a dedicated ground-control station set up within the airport’s military wing shortly before it started operating in May 2021. The drone transmits a near-live video feed and other information captured through a wide range of optical and thermal sensors to Frontex headquarters in Warsaw, where data are analyzed and operational decisions affecting its flight path are taken and fed back to Malta in a constant feedback loop.

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On the day we analyzed the drone’s flight path, we can see the first clear deviation from its usual pattern at 05:20 GMT when the drone takes a sharp turn to fly west and then moves in a loop over the same location. Our analysis indicates this was likely because the drone spotted a small wooden fishing boat carrying approximately 20 men. The Libyan Coast Guard later intercepted the boat in an operation Sea-Watch witnessed.

At the time of this first probable sighting, the SW3 was busy with a rescue operation 30 nautical miles south of the location where the drone made its loop, after receiving an alert from Alarm Phone. After taking on board the 40 passengers, some of whom had severe fuel burns and symptoms of fuel exposure according to Sea-Watch, the SW3 made its way north.

At 07:05 GMT, the drone deviated again to take a sharp north-east turn back toward where it probably first sighted the small wooden boat, performing another loop at 08:00 GMT at a location consistent with where that boat would have been if it was continuing its northerly direction, as is probable.

Unaware of the presence of the small wooden fishing boat, the SW3 continued heading north to disembark its rescued passengers in Sicily. At 12:28 GMT, in international waters, it came in sight of Libyan Coast Guard patrol boat 648—the Ras Jadir, one of four patrol boats Italy returned to Libya in 2017 after refurbishing them—intercepting a boat with about 20 people on board, the SW3 crew said.

Footage shot from the Seabird plane shows the Ras Jadir chasing the small wooden boat as it motors away.

Ultimately, the Libyan Coast Guard launched a RHIB, a lightweight and fast inflatable boat, to capture the boat.

No one was given a lifejacket, and everyone was taken on board the Ras Jadir.

David Lohmüller and Adrian Pourviseh/Sea-Watch

An official EU document indicates that the Ras Jadir returned to the Tripoli Naval Base at 23:34 GMT with 85 people, having intercepted four boats carrying migrants. But none of the locations reported in the document appear to match where the wooden boat was intercepted.

Crucially, none of the nongovernmental rescue boats operating in the area that day received any alerts from Frontex or coastal authorities about the wooden boat. The tracks of oil tankers Superba and Inviken and the supply ship Belize show they were in the vicinity but none of them appear to have changed course, indicating they had not received any instructions to respond to a distress situation, which they would have been obliged to do under the law of the sea.

Frontex did not send out any mayday alerts that day or communicate in any way with nongovernmental rescue ships, in keeping with its stated policy. The agency says it “immediately alerts” national rescue centers in Italy, Malta, Libya, and Tunisia when they spot a “boat in distress” but only issues a mayday alert if there is an “emergency, where lives are at stake.” Between January 2020 and April 2022, Frontex says it issued 21 mayday alerts in the central Mediterranean, a tiny fraction of the boats sighted by its aerial surveillance. In 2021 alone, Frontex says there were 433 detections by aerial surveillance in the central Mediterranean involving 22,696 people.

Limiting communication about boats in distress to national rescue center is a deliberately narrow interpretation of when a mayday alert is warranted. It serves as a justification to alert Libyan authorities, even though the EU knows they are systematically returning people to abuse, and as an excuse not to alert nearby vessels, including nongovernmental ships, which would seek to take passengers to safe European ports.

The interaction between Ras Jadir and the wooden boat was in international waters, where Libyan authorities have no immigration enforcement authority, and within Malta’s search-and-rescue area. The failure of Frontex and member states to alert all vessels in the area, the way the Libyan Coast Guard patrol boat conducted the operation, and the fact that the wooden boat motored away all point to an interception whose sole purpose was to prevent those on board from reaching EU territory, and not a rescue.

According to data from a Frontex database obtained by the nongovernmental organization Frag den Staat, Frontex aircraft detected five boats on July 30, 2021. Libyan forces intercepted all of them and returned all those on board to Libya. A European Union External Action Service (EEAS) classified document that we reviewed also lists five interceptions that day, and although details do not match neatly, there is significant overlap.

One case appears across all sources—a rubber dinghy with approximately 120 people on board. Around 06:30 GMT, Alarm Phone had sent out an alert to the Italian and Maltese maritime rescue coordination centers, as well as to nongovernmental rescue groups, with the number for the satellite phone on the boat. In subsequent phone calls, it became clear the people on board had shut off the engine to conserve fuel and the boat was drifting near an offshore oil platform, 90 kilometers (55 miles) from the Libyan coast.

At 09:44 GMT, a man on the dinghy begged Alarm Phone for help, saying the Libyan Coast Guard had called them to ask for their position. It is possible the Italian and/or Maltese authorities gave the Libyans the satellite phone number—we can’t be sure because the Italian Coast Guard denied our request for information about their operations and communications that day, and the Armed Forces of Malta did not answer. The people on board put their remaining fuel in the engine and started moving again.

At 12:03 GMT the drone made a loop in a position consistent with where the boat would have been as it navigated north, and at 14:15 GMT, the Seabird, the Sea-Watch plane spotted an empty, deflated rubber boat in the area. Information we reviewed indicates the Libyan patrol boat Zuwara conducted an operation in that area involving a boat with 120 people.

The Libyan Coast Guard posted on Facebook about the operation, and Migrant Rescue Watch, a pro-Libyan Coast Guard Twitter account that reports on interceptions and disembarkations, tweeted photos of 121 people , including 10 women and 9 children, from the Zuwara patrol boat disembarking at Tripoli Naval Base. This matches the international Organization for Migration database record. Migrant Rescue Watch said that everyone was taken to a detention center.

Part of a group of 121 people intercepted by the patrol boat Zuwara on July 30, 2021. Exact location at time of photo unclear. Taken from the @rgowans Twitter account.

We spoke with four men, including Abu Laila, who said that Libyan forces intercepted them that day, but none of them were on the rubber dinghy intercepted by the Zuwara or the other two boats we documented. The details they provided suggest they were on four additional boats that are not captured by any official interception logs. It is possible that these sources do not include operations by the General Administration for Coastal Security (GACS), under the Interior Ministry, and the Stability Support Apparatus under the Libyan Prime Minister’s office. We were unable to locate any survivors whose accounts placed them without a doubt on the wooden boat intercepted by the Ras Jadir or the rubber dinghy intercepted by the Zuwara.

The extreme distress Alarm Phone heard on the other end of the call with someone on the rubber dinghy echoes the panic of people on these journeys when they understand Libyan forces are approaching.

Tesfay, a 21-year-old man from Eritrea, was on a two-deck wooden boat—not Abu Laila’s—that day, with about 90 people on board, mostly Eritreans, Ethiopians, and Sudanese. He was on the lower deck, but others told him they saw a plane circling overhead at one point, after the sun was high in the sky. At some later point, a Libyan boat came. “People started to scream. I managed to get to the upper deck…I saw the Libyan ship approaching. People were desperate, three or four…tried to jump in the sea, but they were stopped,” he told us.

Dawit, 28, also from Eritrea, was on a rubber boat with his wife and their 7-year-old daughter. He said they saw an aircraft when the sun was high in the sky, and then later in the afternoon saw a ship approaching. “We didn’t know it was the Libyans until it close enough and we could see the flag. At that point we started to scream and cry. One tried to jump into the sea and we had to stop him. We fought off as much as we could to not be taken back, but we couldn’t do anything about it.”

In their distress, Tesfay and Dawit could not remember enough details about the boats for us to determine what branch intercepted their boats.

Libyan forces have a reputation for reckless and violent behavior at sea. All four men we spoke with said they or others were beaten once aboard the patrol boats that intercepted them. Robel said he was beaten so badly he lost consciousness: “They were hitting us … treating us like animals … they beat me with the rifle butts and also stomped on me with their shoes. They hit me every time I tried to stand up, they hit me on the side of my head.”

All four accounts present a pattern: the distant vision or sound of an aircraft in the sky, the subsequent arrival of Libyan forces by sea, and their return to detention and unspeakable abuse.

Because it can fly closer to the Libyan coast for a longer time, the drone is likely to have played a prominent role, but we need full transparency from Frontex to be certain about its role in these interceptions. All the interceptions logged in official documents for July 30, 2021, took place within the drone’s operational area and its tracks reveal a geometry of loops, U-turns, perfect circles, and sharp corners, all testifying to potential sightings.

The precise geographical coordinates for the five interceptions reported in the classified EEAS document seem to match at least three of these peculiar patterns. But many more exist, suggesting the drone might have been responsible for even more sightings and interceptions that day. What the evidence strongly suggests is that before landing back in Luqa airport just before 18:20 GMT, more than 14 hours after take-off, it played a key role in facilitating the interception of potentially hundreds of people.

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The Veil over Frontex Surveillance

Our investigation came up against Frontex’s lack of transparency. A request to visit the situation room in Warsaw, where life and death decisions are taken based on information gathered via aerial surveillance, was denied. A request to interview operational staff was denied. In processing 27 of 30 freedom of information requests submitted (the others are pending), Frontex identified 3,092 documents related to our inquiries. This may include some double-counting as the requests related to overlapping time periods. They gave us 86. Many, pertaining to operational plans and contracts with companies, were heavily redacted.

Credit Border Forensics. Flight Information Region (FIR) is the area for which a country is responsible for providing basic levels of air traffic service.

Starting in earnest in 2017, Italy and Malta have increasingly abdicated their responsibilities to coordinate and operate rescues at sea in favor of Libyan authorities and obstructed in myriad ways the work of nongovernmental rescue groups both at sea and in the air. Italy and Malta have initiated numerous criminal and administrative proceedings against rescue groups, blocked ships in port, ignored or refused requests to dock to allow rescued people ashore, and grounded these groups’ aircraft. In March 2022, Libya banned Sea-Watch aircraft, operated by Humanitarian Pilots, from flying over its search-and-rescue area, even though it has no authority to do so over the high seas. Since the beginning of 2017, more than 100,600 people have been intercepted and taken back to Libya.

At the same time, European authorities have been building up their presence in the skies. The renewed mandate assigned to EUNAVFORMED as of March 2020 under its new name, “Operation Irini,” extends its scope to “allow for use of aerial surveillance within Libyan airspace.” Most significantly, the proportion of naval and aerial assets participating in the operation was flipped, going from seven ships and three aircraft to two ships and six aircraft, including one drone. Frontex aerial surveillance has significantly expanded since it began in 2015. Over the past four years, Frontex aircraft more than doubled their flight time over the central Mediterranean, from 1,396 hours in the air in 2018 to 2,869 hours in 2021.

The shift from a limited sea presence to aerial surveillance is key to the overall EU strategy. Aerial surveillance allows the EU to monitor what is happening in the central Mediterranean while avoiding direct contact with migrants, asylum seekers, and refugees on the water, which would trigger duties under international law, including having to disembark them in a safe port in Europe.

Dressing up interceptions as rescues is part of this strategy. Former Frontex director Fabrice Leggeri said as recently as March 2021 that the agency did not cooperate directly with the Libyan Coast Guard. A month later, the investigative news organization Lighthouse Reports revealed “back channels between Frontex and the Libyan coast guard, including WhatsApp groups where coordinates of refugee boats are shared.” The agency now explains these communications as complying with international maritime law on rescue at sea, under which it claims to have an obligation to inform all relevant coastal states, including Libya. Airbus, which provides and operates the drone, told us its main mission is “to support search and rescue missions” and that information it gathers “is directly transmitted to the Frontex command and control centre as well as to centres of the respective Coast Guards.”

It’s hard to believe that the imperative to save lives is what’s really behind EU and Frontex policies, given the withdrawal of EU ships, the handover of responsibility to Libyan forces, and the obstruction of rescue NGOs. It’s also hard to reconcile a notion of rescue with migrant boats desperately trying to evade Libyan patrols, people jumping into open waters at the sight of the Libyan flag, and the violence, sometimes fatal, used by Libyan forces during these operations.

Obligations under maritime law don’t exist in a vacuum. People on overcrowded, unseaworthy boats fleeing persecution, violence, and hardship have rights under international human rights and refugee law that Frontex—and the EU as a whole—must respect. Enabling the Libyan Coast Guard to find these people at sea, knowing they will be taken back to detention and abuse, amounts to aiding and abetting human rights violations.

Companies like Airbus that have contracts with Frontex also have responsibilities under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights to ensure their activities don’t harm human rights; Airbus did not respond to questions about whether they undertook any due diligence on their contracts with Frontex.