The Brutal Truth Behind Italy’s Migrant Reduction: Beatings and Rape by EU-Funded Forces in Tunisia

When she saw them, lined up at the road checkpoint, Marie sensed the situation might turn ugly. Four officers, each wearing the combat green of Tunisia’s national guard. They asked to look inside her bag.

“There was nothing, just some clothes.” For weeks Marie had traversed the Sahara, travelling 3,000 miles from home. Now, minutes from her destination – the north coast of Africa – she feared she might not make it.

An armed officer lunged towards her. Another grabbed her from behind, hoisting her into the air. By the road, on the outskirts of the Tunisian city of Sfax, the 22-year-old was sexually assaulted in broad daylight.

It was clear they were going to rape me,” says the Ivorian, her voice wobbling.

Her screams saved her, alerting a group of passing Sudanese refugees. Her attackers retreated to a patrol car.

Marie knows she was lucky. According to Yasmine, who set up a healthcare organisation in Sfax, hundreds of sub-Saharan migrant women have been raped by Tunisian security forces over the past 18 months.

“We’ve had so many cases of violent rape and torture by the police,” she says.

Marie, from the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan, knows others who describe rape by Tunisia’s national guard. “We’re being raped in large numbers; they [the national guard] take everything from us.”

After the attack, Marie headed to a makeshift camp in olive groves near El Amra, a town north of Sfax. Migration experts say that tens of thousands of sub-Saharan refugees and migrants, encircled by police, are now living here. Conditions are described as “horrific”.

Humanitarian organisations, aid agencies, even the UN, are unable to access the camp.

What happened to Marie in May has relevance beyond her continent: her attackers belong to a police force directly funded by Europe.

Her account – along with further testimony gathered by the Guardian – indicates that the EU is funding security forces committing widespread sexual violence against vulnerable women, the most egregious allegations yet to taint last year’s contentious agreement between Brussels and Tunis to prevent migrants reaching Europe.

That agreement saw the EU pledge £89m migration-related funding to Tunisia. Large sums, according to internal documents, appear to have gone to the national guard.

The pact vows to combat migrant smugglers. A Guardian investigation, however, alleges national guard officers are colluding with smugglers to arrange migrant boat trips.

The deal also pledges “respect for human rights”. Yet smugglers and migrants reveal that the national guard is routinely robbing, beating and abandoning women and children in the desert without food or water.

Senior Brussels sources admit the EU is “aware” of the abuse allegations engulfing Tunisia’s security forces but is turning a blind eye in its desperation, led by Italy, to outsource Europe’s southern border to Africa.

In fact there are plans to send more money to Tunisia than publicly admitted.

Despite mounting human rights concerns, the UK prime minister, Keir Starmer, prompted dismay on Monday by expressing interest in the model of paying Tunisia to stop people reaching Europe

During a meeting in Rome with his rightwing counterpart, Giorgia Meloni, Starmer admired how the pact had prompted a “dramatic” reduction in numbers reaching Italy.

By contrast, the number of refugees and migrants near El Amra continues to grow. One migration observer in Sfax estimates there may be at least 100,000, a number that some feel Tunisia’s increasingly autocratic president, Kais Saied, is deliberately cultivating as a threat to Europe: keep the money coming, or else.

“If Europe stops sending money, he’ll send Europe the migrants. Simple,” says the expert, requesting anonymity.

It is a predicament that provokes questions around Europe’s willingness to ditch commitments to human rights to stymie migration from the global south. And how much abuse of migrants such as Marie is Brussels prepared to overlook before re-examining payments to Saied?

***

Moussa could almost taste freedom. Ahead, searchlights shimmering in the water: the Italian coastguard which would ferry him to Europe. But behind, closing in quickly, Tunisia’s national maritime guard. Moussa’s dream was soon shattered.

The 28-year-old from Conakry, Guinea, was on board one of four boats intercepted off Sfax during the night of 6 February 2024. The occupants – about 150 men, women and children – were brought ashore to Sfax, handcuffed and herded on to buses.

At about 2am they arrived at a national guard base near the Algerian border. Shortly after, says Moussa, Tunisia’s security forces began methodically raping the women.

“There was a small house outside and every hour or so they’d take two or three women from the base and rape them there. They took a lot of women.

“We could hear them screaming, crying for help. They didn’t care there were 100 witnesses.”

Afterwards Moussa says some could hardly walk. Others were handed back their babies. Some were viciously beaten.

“There was a pregnant woman and they beat her until blood started coming from between her legs. She passed out,” whispers Moussa in the upstairs area of a Sfax coffee shop. Foreign media are not welcome in the city. Outside, a lookout scouts for police.

His account is corroborated by Sfax organisations working with sub-Saharan migrants.

“We’ve had so many cases of women being raped in the desert. They take them from here and attack them,” says Yasmine, whose group helps survivors overcome physical injuries from such attacks.

Requesting anonymity to avoid being detained, Yasmine says their caseload suggests “nine in 10” of all African female migrants arrested around Sfax had experienced sexual violence or “torture” by security forces.

At another cafe in the gritty neighbourhood of Haffara, a smuggler describes witnessing a sexual assault by police.

“It was dawn and the national guard started searching women for money, but really they were searching their private parts. It was very violent,” says Youssef.

Another Sfax smuggler, Khaled, who ferries migrants from Kasserine, near the Algerian border, to Sfax, describes meeting migrant women attacked in the desert.

“Many times I pick up women who are crying, saying they’ve been raped,” says Khaled, a veteran of more than 1,000 trips.

Along with sexual violence, physical beatings appear routine. Joseph, 21, was taken from the El Amra camp last September during a national guard raid.

“We were handcuffed and put on a bus. Police were beating everyone with batons: kids, women, elderly. Everyone.”

Pointing to a scar above his left eye, the Kenyan adds: “I was hit many times.”

Others fared worse: one guard fired a teargas shell into a friend’s face. “His eye was hanging from his socket plus his leg was broken by police so he had to hop.”

Joseph was left near Algeria where the national guard seized his money, phone and passport. “After thrashing me with a stick they said, ‘Go there [Algeria], don’t come back.’”

In the chaos Joseph lost his friend with the fractured limb. He never saw him again.

Central to the EU-Tunisia deal is its desire to dismantle “criminal networks of migrant smugglers”.

The EU states it wants to improve a code of conduct for Tunisia’s police, an ambition that incorporates human rights training.

Sfax smugglers, however, tell the Guardian of widespread and systematic corruption between them and the national guard.

“The national guard organise the Mediterranean boats. They watch them go into the water then take the boat and motor and sell them back to us,” says Youssef.

Often, he says, the scarcity of £2,000 motors in Sfax means the national guard are the only sellers.

“Smugglers call the police for spare motors. A smuggler might buy the same motor four times from the national guard.”

Another element of the EU-Tunisia deal is facilitating prosecutions against smugglers. When asked for details, the European Commission could not share data on convictions.

The commission says Tunisia and the EU’s police agency, Europol, are seeking to build a partnership to tackle smugglers. Europol says it has no working arrangement with Tunisia.

***

From afar, it looked like a football, bobbing in the water off Sfax. Closer, the grisly truth: a human head, eyes devoured by fish, probably severed from its body by a passing boat.

Ahmed’s most recent catch was on 15 July. On other days he has found legs, occasionally an arm. Usually it is an entire body – normally young, always black – ensnared in his fishing net.

That morning the fishers retrieved one body, then another, and another. Finally, a fourth: a young woman with long hair.

Ahmed brought them ashore but almost none were identified. Some were buried in unmarked graves labelled “African”.

The UN’s refugee agency, UNHCR, normally registers new arrivals, a process “critical to their protection”. But UNHCR has been banned from Sfax by the government.

The agency lists 12,000 refugees or asylum seekers in Tunisia, although officials concede this constitutes a “fraction” of migrant numbers at El Amra.

Abdel, the head of a Sfax-based NGO, which cares for migrant children, estimates a minimum of 100,000.

The UN’s International Organisation for Migration has no updated data, fuelling concern that large numbers of migrants are not being registered. “Individuals disappear as if they never existed,” Abdel says.

More arrive daily. In a smoke-filled Sfax bar, Ali Amami of the Tunisian League for Human Rights says: “Throughout Africa everyone heads here.” Last year Tunisia – with Sfax its centre – was the busiest departure point for migrants reaching Italy.

Now Sfax is off limits. Police have “cleansed” neighbourhoods of migrants, forcing them to El Amra. Cafe owners are arrested if a migrant is caught ordering a coffee.

Police “snatch squads” scout districts such as Haffara, ready to remove any stray migrant.

“Only women have the courage to go shopping,” says Mohamed, a migrant from Guinea. Courage is required. Last month one of his friends – seven months pregnant – visited central Sfax for groceries.

At a checkpoint, police pulled her into a van and took her to the Algerian border. “For days she was begging for water for her and her unborn child.”

Her body was found mid-August near Kasserine, face down in sand. Mohamed estimates up to 50 of his friends have been snatched from Sfax by the national guard and dumped in the desert. Of these five have disappeared or were found dead. Another 10 crossed into Algeria.

Although conditions in the desert are bleak, for many it is preferable to El Amra.

A crackdown, fuelled by Saied’s anti-migrant tirades, has meant organisations that helped El Amra’s migrants have shut. Staff are questioned or arrested. Yasmine folded her group in July after police intimidation.

Images of her colleagues were posted on Facebook, chastising them for helping migrants. “We couldn’t leave our houses for days,” she says.

For the migrants themselves, it means even food and water no longer reach the camp.

“They eat dead animals, roadkill, anything they find,” says Youssef.

Denied all healthcare, Yasmine says the camp is rife with disease including tuberculosis, HIV, scabies and syphilis. Concern is mounting over the infant mortality rate. “Babies are born in 40C heat without medical help, vaccination, food. How can they survive?”

Youssef adds: “I’ve watched women giving birth in the bushes. They need to go to hospital but instead die.”

Unmarked graves of migrants are “everywhere” around El Amra, says Youssef. An olive farmer, he says, recently found two bodies in a shallow grave.

Smuggler Khaled also worries about the body count. He recalls being chased by police as a heavily pregnant woman wailed in the back seat.

“At Sfax I finally turned around and there was a baby! I wept.”

He watched as the mother lowered the infant into a carrier bag and set off walking in 35C heat towards El Amra.

Many more die crossing the Mediterranean. Officially more than 30,000 migrants have gone missing in the Med over the last decade, but many believe this is a significant underestimate.

Few know the route’s escalating risks better than Youssef. More people are crowded on to more dangerous boats. Hastily assembled from metal barrels, the boats float an inch or two above the water.

“They should hold 10 people, but carry 50. From my experience as a smuggler I know many more have died than ever succeeded.”

***

In Sfax, it is known as the “mousetrap”. Abdel, speaking in his office near the city’s medina, says: “You allow the mice over the border but close the sea. Trapped, their numbers boom.”

Using patrol boats provided by Europe, Tunisia’s maritime national guard has prevented more than 50,000 people crossing the Med this year, prompting the steep fall in numbers reaching Italy that so piqued Starmer’s interest this week. “Tunisia is being paid to become Europe’s coastguard,” says Amami.

It is a well-remunerated role, seemingly for its president too. It is claimed that £127m as part of a wider migration and development deal was transferred directly to Saied. Asked for clarification, the European Commission says the payment followed Tunisia meeting “mutually agreed conditions”.

There are also questions about why no EU human rights impact assessment into Tunisia was commissioned before the pact was announced. Similarly, why it has avoided parliamentary oversight.

Emily O’Reilly, the EU ombudsman, says it is inconceivable the EU had no idea the police were repeatedly abusing migrants. “They would not be unaware of the situation in Tunisia.”

Even so, no apparent attempt has been made to suspend payments to Tunis.

Next month O’Reilly publishes the result of her inquiry into the agreement, findings likely to raise fresh questions over its integrity.

A European Commission spokesperson says about reports of abuses by the national guard: “The EU remains engaged to improve the situation on the ground.”

Documents indicate payments have already been made to the national guard. Circulated last December, an action plan indicates that £21m has been “delivered” for patrol vessels, training and equipment for the maritime national guard.

Reports suggest the EU is already planning to extend funding up to £139m over the next three years to Tunisia’s security forces.

The Tunisian authorities have rejected the Guardian’s allegations as “false and groundless”, saying that their security forces operate with “professionalism to uphold the rule of law on our territory, while fully observing international principles and standards”.

A statement says Tunisian authorities “spared no efforts” to meet migrants’ basic needs, combat criminal networks that “exploit vulnerability” and tackle irregular migration by complying with international human rights law.

Yet, as Starmer’s meeting with Meloni this week confirmed, the EU’s deal with Tunisia is increasingly seen as the template for how Europe deals with migration, a salient issue as far right parties gain influence.

Similar deals have already been struck with Mauritania and Egypt. Others are expected to follow.

Back in Tunisia, preparations are under way for presidential elections next month. Saied is certain to win, a coronation that will confirm the unravelling of Tunisia’s democratic experiment since its 2011 revolution.

“In 2011 we dreamed of freedom, now it’s about survival,” says Yasmine.

Marie’s dream remains Europe, but it is slipping away. On a recent voice note from El Amra, she sounds terrified: “There’s a lot going on here. I’m really scared, we’re trapped in hell.”

* Names have been changed for safety reasons.

Further Credits:

1000 Lives, 0 Names: The Border Graves Investigation — How the EU is Failing Migrants’ Last Rights

The Border Graves Investigation was published in over 40 stories in 22 outlets in 9 countries and 8 languages, and its investigative findings were re-reported widely. The investigation has been published in print, digital, radio, video, and podcast forms and drew attention to a crisis of unmarked graves proliferating on Europe’s borders at a scale unprecedented outside of war.

The Border Graves Investigation team consists of eight journalists, working across Europe’s southern and eastern borders, coming together for eight months under cross-border investigative journalism grants from IJ4EU and JournalismFund.

The following article, published in The Guardian is part of a series with several main publications. You can find the links to all publications at the bottom of this page.

Revealed: More than 1,000 unmarked graves discovered along EU migration routes

Bodies also piling up in morgues across continent as countries accused of failing to meet human rights obligations.

Refugees and migrants are being buried in unmarked graves across the European Union at a scale that is unprecedented outside of war.

The Guardian can reveal that at least 1,015 men, women and children who died at the borders of Europe in the past decade were buried before they were identified.

They lie in stark, often blank graves along the borders – rough white stones overgrown with weeds in Sidiro cemetery in Greece; crude wooden crosses on Lampedusa in Italy; in northern France faceless slabs marked simply “Monsieur X”; in Poland and Croatia plaques reading “NN” for name unknown.

On the Spanish island of Gran Canaria, one grave states: “Migrant boat number 4. 25/09/2022.”

The European parliament passed a resolution in 2021 that called for people who die on migration routes to be identified and recognised the need for a coordinated database to collect details of the bodies.

But across European countries the issue remains a legislative void, with no centralised data, nor any uniform process for dealing with the bodies.

Working with forensic scientists from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and other researchers, NGOs and pathologists, the Guardian and a consortium of reporters pieced together for the first time the number of migrants and refugees who died in the past decade along the EU’s borders whose names remain unknown. At least 2,162 bodies have still not been identified.

Some of these bodies are piling up in morgues, funeral parlours and even shipping containers across the continent. Visiting 24 cemeteries and working with researchers, the team found more than 1,000 nameless graves.

Unmarked Graves in Greece, by Daphne Tolis

These, however, are the tip of the iceberg. More than 29,000 people died on European migration routes in this period, the majority of whom remain missing.

The problem is “utterly neglected”, according to Europe’s commissioner for human rights, Dunja Mijatović, who has said EU countries are failing in their obligations under international human rights law.

“The tools are there. We have the agencies and the forensic experts, but they need to be engaged [by governments],” she said. The rise of the hard right and a lack of political will were likely to further impede the development of a proper system to address “the tragedy of missing migrants”, she added.

Instead, pockets of work happen at a local level. Pathologists, for example, collect DNA samples and the few personal items found on the bodies. The clues to lives lost are meagre: loose change in foreign currency, prayer beads, a Manchester United souvenir badge.

The lack of coordination leaves bewildered families struggling to navigate localised, often foreign bureaucracy in the search for lost relatives.

Supporting them falls to aid organisations such as the ICRC, which has recorded 16,500 requests since 2013 for information to its programme for restoring family links from people looking for relatives who went missing en route to Europe. The largest number of requests have come from Afghans, Iraqis, Somalians, Guineans and people from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea and Syria. Only 285 successful matches have been achieved.

And now even some of this support is about to disappear. As governments cut their aid budgets, the ICRC has been forced to refocus its reduced resources. National Red Cross agencies will continue the family links programme but much of the ICRC’s work training police and local authorities is being cut.

A race against time

The mini set of scissors and comb worn on a chain were unique to 24-year-old Oussama Tayeb, a small talisman that reflected his job as a barber. For his cousin Abdallah, they were the hope that he had been found.

Tayeb set sail last year from the north-west of Algeria just before 8pm on Christmas Day. Onboard with him were 22 neighbours who had clubbed together to pay for the boat they had hoped would take them to Spain.

His family has been searching for him since. Abdallah, who lives in France, fears it is a race against time.

Spanish police introduced a database in 2007 in which data and genetic samples from unidentified remains are meant to be logged. In practice, the system breaks down when it comes to families searching for missing relatives, who have no clear information about how to access it.

The family had provided a DNA sample soon after Tayeb’s disappearance. With no news by February, they travelled to southern Spain for a second time to search for him. At the morgue in Almería, a forensic doctor reacted to Tayeb’s photo, saying he looked familiar. She recalled a necklace, but said the man she was thinking of was believed to have died in a jet ski accident.

“It was a really intense moment because we knew that Oussama was wearing a jet ski lifejacket,” Abdallah said.

Even with the knowledge that Tayeb’s body may have been found, his cousin was unable to see the corpse lying in the morgue without a police officer. Abdallah remembered the shocking callousness with which he was greeted at one of the many police stations he tried. “One policeman told us that if ‘they don’t want to disappear, they shouldn’t have taken a boat to Spain’.”

Looming over Abdallah’s continuing search is a practical pressure mentioned by the Spanish pathologist: bodies in the morgue are usually kept for a year and then buried, whether identified or not. “We only want an answer. If we see the chain, this would be like a death certificate. It’s so heartbreaking. It’s like we’re leaving Oussama in the fridge and we can’t do anything about it,” he said.

‘Here lies a brother who lost his life’

The local authorities that receive the most bodies are often on small islands and are increasingly saying they cannot cope.

They warn that an already inadequate system is going backwards. Spain’s Canary Islands have reported a record 35,410 men, women and children reaching the archipelago by boat this year. In recent months, most of these vessels have sought to land on the tiny, remote island of El Hierro. In the past six weeks alone, seven unidentified people were buried on the island.

The burial vaults of 15 unidentified people who were found dead on a rickety wooden vessel in 2020, in the town of Agüimes on Gran Canaria, bear identical plaques that read simply: “Here lies a brother who lost his life trying to reach our shores.”

In the Muslim section of Lanzarote’s Teguise cemetery, the graves of children are marked with circles of stones. They include the grave of a baby believed to have been stillborn on a deadly crossing from Morocco in 2020. Alhassane Bangoura’s body was separated from his mother during the rescue and was buried in an unmarked grave. His name is only recorded informally, engraved on a bowl by locals moved by his plight.

It is the same story in the other countries at the edge of the EU; unmarked graves dotted along their frontiers standing testament to the crisis. Along the land borders, in Croatia, Poland, Lithuania, the numbers of unmarked graves are fewer but still they are there, blank stones or sometimes an NN marked on plaques.

Graves marked “NN” in Croatia, by Tina Xu

In France, the anonymous inscription “X” stands out in cemeteries in Calais. The numbers seem low compared with those found along the southern coastal borders: 35 out of 242 migrants and refugees who died on the Franco-British border since 2014 remain unidentified. The high proportion of the dead identified reflects the fact that people spend time waiting before attempting the Channel crossing so there are often contacts still in France able to name those who die.

Fragments of hope

Leaked footage of Polish border guards laughing at a young man hanging upside down, trapped by his foot, stuck in the razor wire on the top of the 180km (110-mile) steel border fence separating Belarus from Poland caused a brief social media storm.

But the moment he is caught in the searchlights, his frightened face briefly frozen, has haunted 50-year-old Kafya Rachid for the past year. She is sure the man is her missing child, Mohammed Sabah, who was 22 when she last saw him alive.

Sabah had flown from his home in Iraqi Kurdistan in the autumn of 2021 to Belarus, for which he had a visa. He was successfully taken across the EU border by smugglers but was detained about 50km (30 miles) into Poland and deported back to Belarus.

Waiting to cross again, his messages suddenly stopped. The family had been coming to terms with the fact he was probably dead. Then the video surfaced. With little else to go on, fragments such as this give families hope.

Sabah’s parents, as so often happens, were unable to get visas to travel to the EU. Instead, Rekaut Rachid, an uncle of Sabah who has lived in London since 1999, has made three trips to Poland to try to find him.

Rachid believes the Polish authorities lied to him when they told him the man in the video was Egyptian, and this keeps him searching. “They are hiding something. Five per cent of me thinks maybe he died. But 95% of me thinks he is in prison somewhere in Poland,” he said, adding: “My sister calls every day to ask if I think he is still alive. I don’t know how to answer.”

Shipping container morgues

In a corner of the hospital car park in the Greek city of Alexandroupolis, two battered refrigerated shipping containers stand next to some rubbish bins. Inside are the bodies of 40 people.

The border from Turkey into Greece over the Evros River nearby is only a 10- to 20-minute crossing, but people cross at night when their small rubber boats can easily hit a tree and capsize. Corpses decompose quickly in the riverbed mud, so that facial characteristics, clothing and any documents that might help identify them are rapidly destroyed.

Twenty of the corpses in the containers are the charred remains of migrants who died in wildfires that consumed this part of Greece during the summer’s heatwave. Identification has proved exceptionally difficult, with only four of the dead named to date.

Prof Pavlos Pavlidis, the forensic pathologist for the area, works to determine the cause of death, to collect DNA samples and to catalogue any personal effects that might help relatives identify their loved ones at a later date.

The temporary container morgues in Alexandroupolis were donated by the ICRC. The humanitarian agency has given another container to the island of Lesbos, another migration hotspot, for the same purpose.

Lampedusa does not have that luxury. “There are no morgues and no refrigerated units,” said Salvatore Vella, the Sicilian head prosecutor who leads investigations into shipwrecks off its coast. “Once placed in body bags, the bodies of migrants are transferred to Sicily. Burial is managed by individual towns. It has happened that migrants have sometimes been buried in sort of mass graves within cemeteries.”

The scale of the problem was becoming so acute, said Filippo Furri, an anthropologist and an associate researcher at Mecmi, a group that examines deaths during migration, that “there have been cases of coffins abandoned in cemetery warehouses due to lack of space, or bodies that remain in hospital morgues”.

‘It’s not only a technical difficulty but also a political one’

“If you count the relatives of those who are missing, hundreds of thousands of people are impacted. They don’t know where their loved ones are. Were they well treated, were they respected when they were buried? That’s what preys on families’ minds,” said Laurel Clegg, the ICRC forensic coordinator for migration in Europe. “We have an obligation to provide the dead with a dignified burial; and [to address] the other side, providing answers to families through identification of the dead.”

She said keeping track of the dead relied on lots of parts working well together: a legal framework that protected the unidentified dead, consistent postmortems, morgues, registries, dignified transport and cemeteries.

The systems are inadequate, however, despite the EU parliament resolution. There are still no common rules about what information should be collected, nor a centralised place to store this information. The political focus is on catching the smugglers rather than finding out who their victims are.

A spokesperson for the European Commission said the rights and dignity of refugees and migrants had to be addressed alongside tackling people smuggling. They said each member state was responsible individually for how it dealt with those who died on its borders, but that the commission was working to improve coordination and protocols and “regrets the loss of every human life” .

In Italy, significant efforts have been made to identify the dead from a couple of well-reported, large-scale disasters. Cristina Cattaneo, the head of the laboratory of forensic anthropology and odontology (Labanof) at the University of Milan, has spent years working to identify the dead from a shipwreck in 2015 in which more than 1,000 people lost their lives.

Raising the wreck to retrieve the bodies has cost €9.5m (£8.1m) already. Organising the 30,000 mixed bones into identifiable remains of 528 bodies has been a herculean task. Only six victims have so far been issued official death certificates.

As political positions on irregular migration have hardened, experts are finding official enthusiasm for their complex work has diminished. “It’s not only a technical difficulty but also a political one,” Cattaneo said.

In Sicily, Vella has been investigating a fishing boat that sank in October 2019. It was carrying 49 people, mostly from Tunisia. Just a few miles off shore, a group onboard filmed themselves celebrating their imminent arrival in Europe before the boat ran out of fuel and capsized. The Italian coastguard rescued 22 people but 27 others lost their lives.

Coastguard divers, using robots, captured images of bodies floating near the vessel, but were unable to recover all of them. The footage circulated around the world. A group of Tunisian women who had been searching for their sons contacted the Italian authorities and were given permits to travel to meet the prosecutor, who showed them more footage.

One mother, Zakia Hamidi, recognised her 18-year-old son, Fheker. It was a searing experience for both her and Vella: “At that moment, I realised the difference between a mother, torn apart by grief, but who at least will return home with her child’s body, and those mothers who will not have a body to mourn. It is something heartbreaking.”

The torture of not knowing

The grief that people feel when they have no certainty about the fate of their missing relatives has a very particular intensity.

Dr Pauline Boss, professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota in the US, was the first to describe this “ambiguous loss”. “You are stuck, immobilised, you feel guilty if you begin again because that would mean accepting the person is dead. Grieving is frozen, your decision-making is frozen, you can’t work out the facts, can’t answer the questions,” she said.

Not knowing often has severe practical consequences too. Spouses may not be able to exercise their parental rights, inherit assets or claim welfare support or pensions without a death certificate. Orphans cannot be adopted by extended family without one either.

Sometimes relatives are left in the dark for years. A decade on from a shipwreck disaster in 2013, bereaved families continue to gather in Lampedusa every year, still searching for answers. Among them this year was a Syrian woman, Sabah al-Joury, whose son Abdulqader was on the boat. She said that not knowing where he ended up was like having “an open wound”.

Sabah’s family said the torture of not being able to find out what happened to him was “like dying everyday”. Abdallah thinks he must make another trip from Paris to southern Spain before the end of the year. “What is difficult is not to have the body, not to be able to bury him,” he said.

Rituals around death were indicative of a deep human need, said Boss. “The most important thing is for the name to be marked somewhere, so the family can visit, and the missing can be remembered. A name means you were on this Earth, not forgotten.”

This article was amended on 13 December 2023 to make it clear in the caption that the footage of Mohammed Sabah was obtained by Piotr Czaban. Also the temporary container morgues in Alexandroupolis were donated by the ICRC, not loaned as an earlier version said.

Additional Main Stories:

1000 Lives, 0 Names: The Border Graves Investigation (Unbias the News)

Wo ist Mohammed Sabah? (Süddeutsche Zeitung)

Counting the invisible victims of Spain’s EU borders (Unbias the News)

Widowed by Europe’s Borders (Unbias the News)

Missing Data, Missing Souls in Italy (Unbias the News)

The unidentified: Unmarked refugee graves on the Greek borders (Unbias the News)

Nomen Nescio: Dying En Route to Europe, Buried Without a Name (BalkanInsight)

Enterrar a más de mil personas sin nombre: las trabas de la UE y España para identificar los cuerpos de migrantes (El Diario)

«Αγνώστων στοιχείων»: Πάνω από 1.000 αταυτοποίητοι τάφοι στα ευρωπαϊκά σύνορα (Solomon)

Additional Credits: 

Aristea Protonotariou, Research – Solomon
Galatea Iatraki – Illustration – Solomon
Stavros Malichudis – Diligence – Solomon
Antoine Bouraly – Illustration – Unbias the News
Tina Lee – Editor – Unbias the News
Julia Vernersson – Coordination – Unbias the News
Alessio Mamo – Photography – Guardian
Harry Fischer, Alessia Amitrano, Pip Burkett, Seán Clarke and Andrew Halley
– Design and Production – The Guardian
Hafez Al-Moussa – Translation

Supported by Investigative Journalism for Europe and Journalismfund Europe. Additional support by Limelight Foundation.