It was a brief glimmer of hope in otherwise bleak circumstances.
With tears streaming down his face, which was covered in cuts and bruises, Syrian teenager Mohammad, who survived Wednesday’s shipwreck that killed at least 78 people off the coast of Greece, was reunited with his older brother, Fadi, who had traveled from the Netherlands to search for him.
Hugging through metal barricades erected by Greek police around a warehouse in Kalamata where survivors had been sleeping on Friday, Fadi kissed his 18-year-old brother’s head.
The shipwreck — one of the worst ever recorded — has sparked arrests, violent protests and questions about authorities’ failure to act or find a long-term solution to the issue.
The victims drowned when the 65- to 100-foot fishing boat they were traveling on capsized and sank early Wednesday in some of the deepest waters of the Mediterranean.
Initially 78 bodies were recovered and 104 people were rescued, but witnesses and the United Nations later said hundreds more were aboard the boat as the true scale of the disaster fueled mounting anger in Greece and beyond.
Outside the shelter in Kalamata on Sunday, relatives clutched screenshots of loved ones on their mobile phones clinging to threadbare hopes of their survival.
In Jordan, Ayman Al-Shaabani, 50, told NBC News by telephone Sunday that he was praying for news about his younger brother, Khalil, 32, who he said was on board the boat.
“My brother told me that once the phone was switched off, it meant that they were at sea on their way to Italy,” he said. “But his phone remains switched off until now, the boat didn’t reach Italy and we didn’t hear my brother’s voice again.”
Had he known it was their last call, Al-Shaabani said he would have “told him how much I love him and how much I will miss him.”
Khalil, he said, had left his wife and four children in Syria, where he had struggled to find work, in search of a better life in Europe.
He said that they had received better news about his cousin, Moaz Al-Shaabani, who was also on board the ship and had sent them a voice message from a Greek hospital. Moaz started to cry when he asked them about Khalil, who he fears might have died.
Speaking alongside families waiting at the barricaded warehouse in Kalamata, Anwar Bakri, secretary general of the Syrian Association of Greece, told Reuters Saturday he had received “hundreds of calls” from people in Germany, in Turkey and other countries, who feared their Syrian relatives were on the sunken boat.
“I have numerous photos, at least 15 photos until now, of missing people, young children, 16-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 25-year-olds, whose parents are looking for them,” Bakri told Reuters.
It is now feared that they perished when the fishing boat capsized and sank early Wednesday.
Greek authorities were criticized for not acting to rescue the migrants, even though a coast guard vessel escorted the trawler for hours and watched as it sank in minutes.
Under international maritime law, national authorities are compelled to conduct immediate rescue operations on ships in distress, regardless of whether passengers on board want assistance.
But Greece’s coast guard said in a statement that the boat rebuffed several offers of help from both its ships and merchant vessels in the area, adding that the ship’s captain “wanted to continue to Italy.”
Italy is often a preferable landing point for migrants crossing the Mediterranean to Europe, as it allows refugees to avoid the perilous Balkan route into the prosperous northern part of the continent, which is heavily patrolled by both border guards and far-right vigilantes.
Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis has previously taken a tough line on refugees, pledging to lengthen border fencing across the entire length of Greece’s 120-mile long border with Turkey. Meanwhile, in Italy, Premier Giorgia Meloni, who leads the far-right Brothers of Italy party, built popularity with promises to curb migration.
The United Nations has recorded more than 20,000 deaths and disappearances in the central Mediterranean since 2014, making it the most dangerous migrant crossing in the world.
The deadliest recorded incident involved a vessel that capsized off the coast of Libya in 2015, claiming the lives of an estimated 800 migrants.
