Seventeen members of the Greek coast guard are facing prosecution after the country's deadliest migrant shipwreck, survivor representatives said Friday, May 23. Authorities are accused of being slow to save people despite the alerts sent out.

In June 2023, the Adriana, a rusty and overloaded trawler that had set sail from Tobruk, Libya, sank southwest of Pylos, in the Peloponnese. More than 750 people were on board. According to the UN, more than 600 are believed to have died. Only 82 bodies have been recovered.

"Nearly two years after the Pylos shipwreck, the criminal prosecutions against 17 members of the Greek coastguard, including high-ranking officers, mark a major step forward for the victims," ​​six NGOs wrote in a statement.

According to the shipwreck victims' lawyers, the charges target the captain and crew of the patrol sent to the scene, but also the former head of the coast guard, the supervisor of the Greek National Maritime Rescue Coordination Center, and two maritime safety officers on duty that day.

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'A series of serious and persistent omissions'

This decision follows the publishing of a report on the incident in February 2025 by the Greek state Ombudsman. Andreas Pottakis then recommended sanctions against coast guard personnel involved in the sinking in a press release. In his investigation, the Ombudsman highlighted "a series of serious and persistent omissions in search and rescue tasks by senior officers of the Greek Coast Guard." According to him, the authorities "did not take, within the scope of their powers, the measures that could reasonably be considered appropriate to avoid harm.”

Andreas Pottakis's findings were forwarded to the Greek state for possible prosecution. This has now been done.

At the time of the Ombudsman's report, the Greek government, ​​through its Minister of Maritime Affairs, Christos Stylianides, claimed that Andreas Pottakis "was seeking to shift the focus from criminal trafficking networks to the Coast Guard officers who fight day and night to protect the country."

Only 104 people survived the shipwreck, dozens of whom filed a collective criminal complaint against the Greek Coast Guard in September 2023. They accuse the Greek Coast Guard of taking hours to respond despite alerts sent by the European Union agency Frontex and the Alarm Phone hotline. In addition to Syrians and Palestinians, nearly 350 Pakistani nationals were on board the vessel, according to Pakistani authorities.

Read AlsoGreece comes in for criticism over Pylos shipwreck probe

Greece denies responsibility in the shipwreck

Since the beginning of this affair, Greece has denied having any responsibility for their deaths. Its defense is based primarily on the fact that the overcrowded trawler did not require emergency assistance because it was proceeding at a steady pace toward Italy, as the passengers had requested.

In 2023, a month after the sinking, Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis called the accusation against the port authorities "very unfair."

In June 2023, the BBC demonstrated that the boat was stationed off the coast of Greece, and not sailing toward the Italian coast. Analysis of the movements of other vessels in the area suggests that the overloaded trawler did not move for at least seven hours before sinking.

Furthermore, survivors claimed, a few hours after the sinking, that the navy capsized the boat while attempting to tow it out of Greek waters.

The migrants' lawyers also point out that the authorities chose to send a patrol boat from Crete when a more suitable rescue tug was stationed closer, in the port of Gythio, in the Peloponnese. The patrol boat's video and black box were damaged during the operation, they say, and were not repaired until two months after the tragedy.

Nine Egyptian migrants were initially identified by the Greek government as smugglers responsible for the Pylos shipwreck. But after 11 months in pretrial detention, in May 2024, these nine migrants were found innocent by the courts, on the first day of their trial.