In the first detailed interview with a survivor — and through obtained court and forensic records, testimonies from both survivors and coast guard officers, and interviews with current and former Greek Coast Guard officials — Solomon traces the events of the night a boat carrying migrants collided with a Greek Coast Guard vessel, and the sharply different accounts of what happened at sea.
The sea was calm prior to the collision that night of 3 February. The moon had waned just past full, and a small inflatable boat packed with nearly 40 people drew close to the shores of the Greek island of Chios.
What happened next is sharply disputed. The Greek Coast Guard says the inflatable dinghy careened into the side of its patrol vessel. Survivors insist the coast guard boat rammed into them without warning.
Fifteen people died, including at least four minors, and more than two dozen were injured — hospitalized with broken ribs, arms, and severe head injuries.
“Nobody alerted us to anything, nobody shouted at us with a speaker. Suddenly, one big boat just came and crashed into us,” said one of the survivors, who wishes to remain anonymous out of fear for their asylum case. “People must know — it was not an accident. It was not.”
As part of this investigation, Solomon has reviewed public statements, eight sworn testimonies by survivors given to the Greek judicial authorities, the sworn testimonies of the captain and one crew member of the coast guard vessel involved, ship-tracking data, a technical damage assessment of the patrol vessel commissioned by the coast guard, 15 forensic death certificates of victims, and a missing persons identification report. Solomon also spoke to current and former Greek Coast Guard officials, and a survivor in a first public interview.
Taken together, the material reveals stark inconsistencies between the official account and survivors’ testimonies — leaving key questions about the collision and the conduct of authorities unanswered.
If the coast guard vessel did strike the rubber boat, the incident would fit a pattern documented in previous encounters in the Aegean and could carry implications under Greek and international maritime law.
“My story is very hard. We came here for protection,” said the survivor who spoke to Solomon. For their safety, the survivor is identified here as Sayed. This is not necessarily a reflection of the survivor’s gender. To protect their identity, details about their family are omitted.
Originally from Afghanistan, like most of the passengers, Sayed wanted to reach Greece to build a better future for their family. When they speak about the night, Sayed becomes agitated, and their words run faster.
Late on 3 February, Sayed was among a group gathered on a beach in the Turkish town of Çeşme, boarding an inflatable boat bound for Chios, a distance of about 18 kilometers. Their family paid around €4,000 per person for crossing.
Several survivors later testified that smugglers shouted at passengers to keep their heads down as they boarded. One said they were threatened with beating if they looked up.
The dinghy set off under the cover of darkness. No one wore a life jacket.
The boat crossed from Turkish into Greek waters, chugging along for roughly 20 to 50 minutes.
Sayed said passengers checked GPS on their phones and believed they were just a few minutes from land when suddenly a bright white light overcame their vision.
“There was a light, like an emergency light, and then they came quickly and hit us,” Sayed said. “After that, we didn’t know what was happening. Then I looked at the sea around me, and … people were dead.”
Two survivor testimonies viewed by Solomon say that before the collision things were calm, with several describing a bright white light just seconds before. None of the 8 survivors who testified said they heard the coast guard warnings or saw sirens.
Several survivors were asked by the investigating judge if their rubber boat made a turn, each said they had been moving straight ahead. Then they felt the crash.
“There were many people dead and a lot of blood, I don’t want to remember it,” one survivor testified. “It was very difficult. When the crash happened, I saw in front of me people being killed by the boats hitting each other. I don’t know if anyone drowned.”
“We did not want to lose our families and our kids,” Sayed told Solomon. “We would have stopped [our journey]. The coast guard came up from behind us. They wanted us dead. They killed us,” they added, describing what they believe was a deliberate ramming.
The Greek Coast Guard maintains a different version of events.
In a statement issued the day after the crash, officials said the operator of the inflatable speedboat “did not comply with the light and sound signals of the patrol boat of the Greek Coast Guard, but instead reversed course and collided with the right side of the patrol boat”.
In his testimony, the captain of the coast guard ship PLS1077 said the crew had been alerted to the dinghy at 8:25pm and immediately activated a rotating blue emergency light, similar to those on police cars. He said they approached within 3 to 4 minutes.
“We were all inside the boat, with the windows open so the migrants could hear our voices telling them to stop. There are loudspeakers from which the siren can be heard,” the captain testified. “We turned on the headlights, one that shone in front and one that shone to the right as soon as the target was spotted about 100 meters away.”
According to the captain, the inflatable boat then suddenly made a sharp left, apparently lost control, and hit the coast guard vessel. The chief petty officer gave a similar account.
Asked about survivors’ descriptions of a blinding white light, the chief petty officer said he could not explain the discrepancy.
Obtained documents, forensic reports and maritime data reviewed by Solomon raise questions about the coast guard’s account.
There is no entry describing the collision in the PLS1077 shiplog. In his sworn testimony, the captain said that an injury on his nondominant hand prevented him from recording the incident. Although there is some scope for later entries, the ship’s log is the official, contemporaneous record of a vessel’s journey and stands as the primary evidence for legal accountability under both Greek and international maritime law.
Publicly released photographs of the right side of the vessel show scuffing and scratches on a rubber-wrapped bumper.
An official damage assessment, conducted by a retired coast guard officer, states that the PLS1077 sustained multiple surface scratches along its starboard (right) side, including one deeper mark near the stern. A crack was recorded along the port (left) side from bow to stern, and the control lever inside the ship was noted to be deformed. The photographs documenting the damage are tightly cropped.
In a written form accompanying the assessment, the coast guard-appointed expert concluded that the “smuggler rammed the coast guard vessel.”
A former senior coast guard official, who spoke to Solomon on the condition of anonymity, said the official account — particularly the claim that the dinghy rammed the patrol boat and not the other way around, strains credibility.
“In my decades of service, I have never seen a small dinghy with nearly 40 people on board perform a ‘sharp left’ maneuver at 30 knots to ram a patrol vessel; ask any expert from the U.S. to the Antipodes and they will say it is a physical impossibility,” the former official said.
The same source reviewed the official damage assessment for Solomon. He pointed to two elements he said raise questions: the crack running nearly the length of the hull, which he said would be difficult to reconcile with an impact from a small inflatable boat, and a warped handrail behind the captain’s seat — a distortion the assessment attributes to “the impact received.” That damage, he said, could suggest the patrol vessel acted like a “hammer” and delivered, rather than absorbed, the force of the collision.
A second officer currently serving in the force, who also requested anonymity because he was not authorized to comment publicly, said that, based on his experience, such encounters with migrant boats are often intended to create a physical presence that forces a “turn back.”
“The tactics used — the close proximity, the wave generation, and the sudden positioning — are designed to intimidate the driver into reversing course before they enter Greek waters or, in this case, reach the Chios shoreline.”
He added, “If you are traveling at 30 knots — as the coast guard expert report claims — the margin for error is zero. You aren’t ‘patrolling’ at that speed; you are intercepting with intent to redirect.”
Defense attorney Alexis Georgoulis, one of the two lawyers representing the Moroccan man accused of steering the boat, told Solomon: “If, instead of initiating a rescue operation, authorities attempted to redirect or intercept the dinghy in a manner that created additional risk, this would raise serious legal questions.”
Under international maritime law, vessels have a duty to assist people in distress at sea, regardless of nationality or legal status. European regulations also require search-and-rescue measures when overcrowded or unsafe boats are intercepted.
The patrol vessel involved in the collision, PLS1077, does not appear in civilian tracking records. Solomon asked the Greek Coast Guard whether radar, GPS tracking, or radio communications data exists from the night of the collision. No response was received by time of publication.
Survivors were transported to the hospital in Chios. Hospital staff reported that five people underwent surgery during the night, while three more awaited intensive care procedures. A child with bandages taped around his head told reporters he had been traveling with his father, and wasn’t sure if he had died. More than 24 survivors were injured. As of publication, one person remained in a coma.
In the days that followed, Sayed described waves of confusion, as survivors tried to understand who was missing, and what their own injuries were. Sayed said police officers asked for their phone “just to check” but then took it away, making it impossible to communicate with worried family.
Ruhi Loren Akhtar, Founder of U.K.-registered charity Refugee Biriyani & Bananas, which operates on Chios, said most of the survivors’ phones appeared to have been confiscated, and there was confusion about who was on the boat and who survived.
“We’re getting a lot of calls from Afghan people who say their families and friends were on the boat, but we haven’t verified anything yet,” she said in the days after. “There’s a bit of a block-out where they are not letting NGOs or anybody access people.”
Solomon asked the Greek Coast Guard why phones were confiscated and by which authority, but did not receive a response.
Most painfully for Sayed, in those first hours they did not know which of their family members had died. They said they were pressured by officials to give a statement, and repeatedly said they were in no state to speak.
“The police told me ‘My friend, I promise your [family members] are alive, just tell me who was the captain,’” Sayed said. “One passenger is from Morocco, and they seemed to think he is the captain. But I don’t know who the captain was. Everyone came on the boat as passengers.”
Officials later showed Sayed photos of the deceased. One was a family member. Sayed struggles to put the loss into words.
Solomon reviewed official victims lists showing that at least four of the victims were identified by relatives as minors — aged 12, 16, 17 and 17 — while a 14-year-old boy remains officially missing. One family lost six people.
The morning after the collision, in Athens, in an ongoing debate about a new migration bill in the Greek parliament, the Minister of Migration and Asylum, Thanos Plevris, said: “Yesterday’s tragic incident in Chios demonstrates the battle we must wage against murderous traffickers,” adding that the legislation would impose tougher penalties.
That same day, a 31 year old Moroccan on board the rubber boat, the only non-Afghan passenger, was arrested and charged with transportation of undocumented migrants and causing a shipwreck. He denies the accusations and says he too was a passenger. He remains in custody pending trial.
His lawyer, Alexis Georgoulis, said two people identified his client as the boat driver during the preliminary investigation, but later withdrew those statements.
In these testimonies reviewed by Solomon, survivors were asked about the driver of the boat, and shown a single photo. All of them said they did not recognize the person or were unsure if they had ever seen him.
“It is leading the witness. It is not a legal procedure for identifying a suspect,” Georgoulis said, adding that in a proper identification procedure, investigators would present multiple photographs, including the suspect alongside other individuals, rather than a single image.
He said the defense has filed a request for additional evidence, including an examination of the rubber boat, and is appointing technical expert advisors.
On 19 February the coast guard made an attempt to locate the inflatable boat in the area where the crash had happened, with attorney Georgoulis present. The boat was not located.
The coast guard captain and chief petty officer testified that they had not turned on the camera on their patrol vehicle, and that they had not been provided a memory card by the coast guard, making recording impossible.
This is not the only instance in which footage has been unavailable after a deadly incident at sea.
After the shipwreck off Pylos in June 2023, in which more than 600 people died, survivors accused the coast guard of tugging their overpacked fishing trawler, leading it to capsize. Footage from that operation was likewise unavailable, as previously reported by Solomon and its partners.
Solomon has covered the Pylos shipwreck and its aftermath extensively since 2023, reporting on the night of the tragedy, the prosecution of survivors and the legal scrutiny of Coast Guard actions. An award-winning investigation reconstructed the sinking and the questions of responsibility that followed. Read more here.
“It is inconceivable that in every tragic incident that takes place in our seas, the Coast Guard’s cameras are not functioning,” said Georgoulis.
In the Pylos case, nine survivors were prosecuted as suspected smugglers and later acquitted. An investigation by Solomon and its partners found that Greek authorities had information indicating the men were not part of the smuggling network, yet kept them in detention for nearly a year.
Solomon asked the Greek Coast Guard to clarify its procedures for onboard video recording and search-and-rescue missions. The coast guard was also asked for comment on allegations from survivors that the collision was not an accident. No response was received by time of publication.
Lawyers and advocates say the incident is not isolated, pointing to other documented instances in which coast guard vessels drove directly at migrant boats in apparent attempts to force a “turn back.”
A video released by attorney Dimitris Choulis, also on the defense team of the accused Moroccan man, and later published by local media , appears to show a Hellenic Coast Guard patrol boat driving directly in the direction of an inflatable boat as the passengers scream in terror.
In another incident in August of 2024, the coast guard announced that a migrant boat accelerated “with the aim of escaping”, prompting a pursuit in which, according to the authorities, the inflatable vessel carried out dangerous maneuvers and struck the patrol boat. One of the passengers of the inflatable boat died
Death certificates from the Chios crash reviewed by Solomon show that 14 of the 15 victims died from severe head injuries, and one died from drowning. Of those with head injuries, five had accompanying injuries to the thorax, one to the neck. The concentration of fatal cranial injuries documented in the forensic reports is consistent with severe blunt-force trauma sustained during a high-impact collision.
“Whenever the memory of that night crosses my mind, my whole body starts shaking, like a nervous tic. It happens every single time,” Sayed told Solomon.
They are trying to wrap their head around what their life will look like moving forward. They know that they want the remains of their family member to be sent to Afghanistan.
“I want to take them to my country,” Sayed said. “I don’t want my [family member] to be here, dead in the country that killed them. I don’t want them to be here.”
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