Back home from sea of death

Ismail

Ismail looked up at the sky and took a deep breath.

“I saw death so close. For 16 to 17 hours, I along with 40 to 50 people tried to stay afloat in the water,” he recalled.

This is how the 22-year-old Bangladeshi began the tale of his survival.

Their rickety boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea off the Libyan coast in Tripoli on August 24, but he and 24 other Bangladeshis survived.

Yesterday around 5:00am, they returned home by a Turkish Airlines flight.

Ismail said there were around 600 passengers on the upper and lower decks of the boat. But it started to sink one hour after sailing off around 2:00am. He was on the upper deck.

“Around 300 passengers, mostly women and children, at the lower deck died, as they did not know how to swim. Those of us who were on the upper deck could do nothing to help them. We just tried to save our lives,” he said.

“Everyone was screaming, crying and praying to Allah.”

Ismail said he managed to survive by clinging to a wooden plank.

After several hours, a rescue boat arrived. But only 50 to 60 people could get on it. This boat, too, sank as it was overcrowded.

“It was a rubber boat. Everyone tried to board it. As a result, it sank,” Ismail said.

Finally, Red Crescent volunteers and the Libyan navy rescued around 200 people. Around 100 Bangladeshis were reportedly on the boat with the migrants mainly from Syria and Iraq.

“I cannot say how many Bangladeshis died. Two people from Gazipur I knew died,” he said.

Ismail, from Savar on the outskirts of Dhaka, went to Egypt around four years ago in search of a job as a factory worker. Last year, he along with several others entered Libya where they stayed for one and a half years.

Last July, he planned to migrate to Germany as an asylum seeker. “I also wanted to earn enough money for my family back home.”

Ismail then got introduced with a Bangladeshi broker who helped him board the rickety boat.

“I paid the broker 2,000 Libyan dinars [Tk 3 lakh] to be on board. He took away my passport before sending me to the boat,” he claimed.

Ismail's father Jamal Hossain told The Daily Star that his son did not send any money for more than a year.

“He told me that he had no regular job. So, it was difficult for him to meet his own expenses. But now I realise that he saved the money to go to Germany,” he said.

The stories of 24 others are no different.

ASM Ashraful Islam, counsellor (labour) at the Bangladesh embassy in Libya, yesterday told The Daily Star that two other Bangladeshis did not fly back home as they wanted to stay in Libya.