Refugees and migrants are not treated like first-class passengers when they set out for Europe: stowed away on cargo ships, piled onto dinghies, they are often abandoned, their smugglers no longer interested in their fate.
Who are those well-organised criminals hiding behind those ships? Are they members of criminal or even terrorist networks? Are these ‘ghost ships’ linked together? Can European countries really work together to detect these structures and unearth their financial flows?
A team consisting of three Belgian, two Jordanian, one Turkish, one Romanian, one Greek and one Italian journalist set out for an investigation, starting with the ships on which men, women and children are sent to “Fortress Europe”.
Photo © Gabriel Drogeanu
