The Search and Seizure of the Iuventa.
In August 2017, the MRCC sent us on a wild goose chase: we were to assist a small rubber boat in international waters off the Libyan coast. By the time we arrived, an Italian coast guard vessel had already completed the rescue...
A most unusual case for the Mediterranean passage: the rubber boat carried only two passengers, both Syrian. The Italian MRCC instructed us to take them on board and set course for Italy. We agreed, expecting to meet another north-bound vessel along the way and hand over the two rescued men so that we could return to the rescue zone. That would have been in line with standard procedure. Yet every ship we asked for assistance offered some implausible justification for refusing the transfer. After four days of waiting, the Iuventa was sent on another search, this time for a boat in distress south of Lampedusa.
The boat was never assigned an official case number, as standard protocol would require. We asked other ships in the area via radio whether they had been informed about the alleged distress call south of Lampedusa: no one had heard of it. We searched anyway. Moonbird, the reconnaissance aircraft operated by Sea-Watch and the Humanitarian Pilots Initiative, offered to join the search. Although the aircraft could have covered the search area within hours, the MRCC declined the offer. Instead, for the first and only time ever, we were ordered to follow a fixed search pattern. It was so tight, as if a boat could not be spotted from 100 metres away, and it was evidently calculated for a helicopter, not a ship: set and drift were not accounted for.
We had no choice but to follow this search pattern northwards, towards Lampedusa. By the time the MRCC called off the search, we were only a few miles from the island. We requested a rendezvous with a coastguard boat to hand over our passengers; it was refused. As soon as we entered territorial waters, we understood why. We had sailed straight into an ambush. Five Italian vessels surrounded us and ordered us into port.
In retrospect, much suggests that both distress cases reported by the MRCC had been fabricated in order to force us into port.
After our two passengers had disembarked during the night and been safely handed over to the authorities, the next morning brought a surprise: a search of the ship. Dozens of officers with sniffer dogs and specialised cameras came on board, allegedly looking for explosives and weapons.
The justification for this measure was a fabricated claim: months earlier, at a clandestine meeting at sea, we were said to have taken over weapons and explosives from a "ghost ship."
On 4 May 2017, MRCC Rome had instructed the Iuventa to withdraw from an ongoing rescue and head for Lampedusa with five unaccompanied minors on board, after a promised rendezvous with the coast guard vessel CP904 for the transfer of the rescued had fallen through. This instruction, as we later learned from the case files, served one purpose: to bug the Iuventa in the port of Lampedusa.
When we arrived at the agreed meeting point and understood that the rendezvous would never happen, we went into drift and informed the MRCC, while Rome supposedly searched for a solution. It is precisely this waiting period that the police document reinterprets as "playing for time," and the coincidental proximity of another vessel as a planned "rendezvous."
The SHADA: a flagless ship, formerly registered in Bolivia, owned by a Libyan national living in Malta, moving through the area on a "non-linear course." The investigators speculated that it "could have come very close" to the Iuventa. Nothing more: no confirmed contact, no intercepted communication, no observed handover, only a theoretical possibility. That same night, the Italian navy stopped the SHADA, searched the ship, and questioned its five crew members.
What makes the affair doubly absurd, and shows how sloppily the authorities could afford to operate: on board the Iuventa was a film crew from ZDF, one of Germany's public broadcasters. These journalists were never questioned, their footage never examined.
So this was plainly not the result of an investigation. It was a pretext. Article 41 of a public security law from 1931, still in force, permits immediate search and seizure when the police have knowledge of undeclared weapons or explosives, "even if only through an indication." The claim created the legal opening. It did not have to be true. It only had to be made.
Dozens of officers, sniffer dogs and specialised cameras, live coverage of the "ongoing investigation," leaked documents, and the decisive combination of keywords: "weapons," "migrants," "NGO ship" delivered the spectacle.
More than 50 police officers searched the ship to no avail, acting on politically motivated instructions, incredulous themselves about their orders. One officer looked at me and said: "On days like this I hate my job, because the work you do out there is so important. You are not the sort of people they are trying to portray you as."
The result: no weapons were found. No explosives were found. What the authorities discovered and confiscated were our computers and phones, along with files documenting sea rescue. And most importantly: hundreds of life jackets.
In the afternoon, after hours of searching, the investigators packed up their loot and left the ship. Shortly afterwards, we were handed the seizure order for the Iuventa. The crew had to leave the vessel, and that evening the Iuventa was taken to Trapani by officers of the Italian coast guard. She has been lying there ever since.