Libya’s EU-Backed Coast Guard Attacked a Migrant Rescue Ship

“In a conflict zone I would be more expecting to face this level of violence,” says Ayla. “In the Mediterranean, this intensity of targeted shooting is beyond my anticipation and comprehension.”

They hurried to the bridge of the Viking, whose team were communicating with a fast-approaching Libyan Coast Guard (LCG) vessel.

They were in international waters, where free passage is a right, but the LCG ordered them to change course. Multiple similar incidents had occurred during the Viking’s rotation; each time, they complied to avoid a fight.

“Out, or we’ll kill you,” the LCG crew allegedly ordered in Arabic. As the crew prepared to comply, Lucille, who was on the bridge, saw two armed figures on deck pointing at them. By the time she’d adjusted her binoculars, bullets were flying.

“When the first windows exploded on my head, we all got on the floor,” SARCO Angelo Selim comments. One military veteran on board believes the fire came from at least two types of weapons, one automatic.

Still under fire, the bridge crew brought the Viking wheeling north. The cultural mediator pleaded with the attackers to stop; instead, they insulted him. Ayla helped gather the remaining crew in a safe room below deck. Crewmember John, meanwhile, was with the Red Cross team taking care of survivors outside on deck. They initially put tarpaulins down to block visibility.

“[When the shooting started] we called survivors to get inside the men’s shelter and lie down.”

Some minutes later, they attempted to move to a safer place, but the Libyan vessel appeared in front of them as they moved. “We dropped to the ground to avoid being shot, then crawled inside one by one,” John recalled.

The attacking vessel circled the Viking, pouring what the crew say was hundreds of rounds into their ship in a twenty-minute ordeal.

The Ocean Viking’s white-painted bridge, the nerve center of the ship, is clear and unmissable. “Shots penetrated multiple windows on the bridge at head height,” says Ayla — an account corroborated in pictures taken by onboard photojournalist Max Cavallari.

While no one was hurt and a Libyan Coast Guard spokesperson claims “warning” shots were fired, the Viking’s crew insist the attack was targeted and deadly. “They sought to kill us,” says one.

After three circuits, the Libyan vessel broke south. The Viking’s bridge crew tracked it on the radar, ensuring it was fully gone before crewmembers emerged to assess the damage and recover shell fragments.

“We had been hit on all sides,” says Ayla. “One RHIB (one of the fast rescue boats, of which Ocean Viking carries three, worth an average €150,000) was deflated, and all were damaged.”

“I’ve worked on that RHIB for over three years”, says crewmember Patrick. “I’ve seen it save lives.” To see it ruined was “heart-wrenching,” he adds.

Rescue equipment and the crew’s own lifeboat were hit, and the ship was no longer watertight. At the time of writing, the damage has not been fully assessed.

This is the latest in a long series of violent assaults. Ayla’s first rescue mission took place in 2016, just days after an Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders) crew were shot at. Since then, multiple shooting incidents have taken place, including at least four in the last eighteen months.

But while shots have been fired into the air or water around rescuers before, this incident was unprecedented in its scale and ferocity. Rescued people and humanitarian workers were lethally and deliberately targeted, not in a conflict zone but in waters as likely to be traversed by cruise ships as humanitarians.

Nor was this a case of piracy or war. People in distress were targeted by the policies of the very states on whose mercy they had thrown themselves. Among the rescue personnel, European citizens were targeted by forces equipped and trained with their taxes.

Ocean Viking never found out what happened to the distress case it had been searching for.

The crew had been on rotation for nearly five weeks before the attack, sailing between Southern Europe and North Africa.

The former oil supply vessel is operated by SOS Méditerranée and the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC). Its crew of over thirty seafarers, carers, and rescuers spend six to seven weeks at a time responding to people in distress on the world’s most lethal migration route. They are among a handful of NGO-operated vessels that fill gaps where the states responsible have largely withdrawn.

“We were already in a state of increased alertness before the shooting,” says Ayla. In addition to Libyan harassment, there had been an unusual number of violent events, and recent shipwrecks.

Earlier in the rotation, presumed smugglers had approached the Viking at speed, forcing their passengers into the water in pitch-black darkness. Ayla recalls that the rescued people were too terrified to tell the crew about this story at first and “claimed they had jumped of their own accord. They only opened up to the protection team a day or more later. But we had seen the whole thing.” Researchers say such incidents have become more common in the last year.

The European Union claims its policies combat the smugglers responsible for abuses. But migration experts have long argued that aggressive border enforcement does the opposite, making migrants more reliant on dangerous journeys and potentially unscrupulous actors.

Repeatedly throughout July and August, Ocean Viking was alerted to cases only to arrive too late as the LCG intercepted people first and returned them to a country where torture, incarceration, and death are all too common for people migrating.

If EU-backed Libyan forces are becoming more violent toward rescue crews, such behavior has long been “routine for people on the move at sea, carried out with impunity,” says Jihed, a Tunisian activist with the rescue ship MV Louise Michel.

Mirka Schäfer, from rescue NGO SOS Humanity, agrees:

Armed Libyan units and unidentified groups recklessly endanger lives — circling rescue ships, forcing people into the water, and threatening crews with guns. In addition, unidentified actors speed toward rescue ships in dangerous maneuvers, driving people into the water or forcing them to jump aboard. This lawlessness is Europe’s creation.

In June, SOS Humanity released dozens of testimonies of survivors recorded on board over the past years in its report Borders of (In)humanity.

A Sudanese refugee quoted by SOS Humanity described Libyan security forces as “terrorists” who “do human trafficking . . . handing the migrants from person to person.”

“They took our money and shot at the boat, so we started to capsize. I lost my two brothers in the sea,” said survivor Fatime (a pseudonym). “We were beaten up and tied up,” added Keita, another. “They’re bandits.”

I have been told similar horror stories by survivors during my four rotations on rescue ships in the last two years.

There is wide documentation, including by the United Nations, of the double game played by various Libyan security forces — associated both with the UN-recognized government at Tripoli and its eastern rival — as these authorities enforce Europe’s border while also smuggling people across it.

“The dynamics aren’t completely understood,” adds Marc Tilley, an independent Mediterranean open source intelligence (OSINT) analyst, former researcher for the Centre for Humanitarian Action at Sea, and SAR crewmember, “but there was an accepted separation between the Coast Guard and Coastal Security, who had theoretically different mandates.”

When migrant arrivals increased a decade ago, Tilley adds, “Coastal Security groups started to understand that not only could they profit from migrants hoping to leave Libya but also they could interfere with rival groups by extorting them to allow safe passage or by intercepting and detaining for ransom, effectively a vicious circle of departure, interception, and return.”

The militias, Tilley says, have been operating ever further from Libya, sometimes at the behest of European coastal states who go directly to commanders rather than through the Tripoli government.

This empowers them, he adds, “to become more brazen and reckless.”

Survivors on board Ocean Viking had fled war zones. John remarks that some even seemed more prepared than the crew — but it’s clearly something different to have such an event happen after being rescued.

“We have a sign when people come aboard, telling them they’re safe,” laments crewmember Lucille. “And, well, that wasn’t true.”

For many of the crew, such a brush with death was new. “Some of us were shocked and emotional, whilst some of us focused on work,” says Ayla. “Many of us had a feeling of it being too absurd to comprehend. On a surface level we’re fine, but nobody is really able to rest well. There’s a lot of suppression.”

I spoke to the crew the night after their arrival in Sicily, a little over a day’s sailing from the incident. At this point, it remained aboard at anchor, not yet allowed to disembark despite its ordeal. The rescued people had been taken ashore and were being held in tents on the shoreline, next to a pile of rubbish.

Italy’s forensics authority, the Polizia Scientifica, had boarded the ship to investigate. But members of the crew say they were questioned less than they had expected and had the sense that authorities were disengaged.

Immediately after the shooting, the Viking requested a closer port to disembark in (it was initially dispatched to Marina di Carrara in Italy’s distant north; authorities routinely assign faraway ports in a policy rescuers say is designed to frustrate operations.) It was allowed to proceed to Sicily.

En route, it contacted NATO’s Mediterranean security mission, Operation Sea Guardian, which is overseen from the bloc’s maritime command in London. Fearing another incident, the crew wanted a military escort. They also called EU border agency Frontex, the Italian Navy, and authorities in Norway (where the ship is registered).

“But all our requests fell on deaf ears,” Ayla notes. “We were on our own.”

The European Commission has since expressed concern about the incident, as has Frontex. Whether that will manifest in any shift in posture remains to be seen. Over the last decade, the EU has spent hundreds of millions of euros on migration control in Libya, with human rights observers’ complaints going ignored.

“Gross violations . . . including summary executions, enforced disappearances and torture, continue to be committed throughout Libya with almost total impunity,” reported an EU review of the bloc’s own Border Assistance Mission to Libya in 2018. This July, the mission’s mandate to train and equip Libyan security forces was renewed for a further two years.

Libya’s patrol boats are built in Italian shipyards and donated and maintained by Rome, with European backing. In 2019, France dropped a plan to transfer boats under public pressure. The four Corrubia-class patrol vessels (which attacked the Viking and previously fired shots around Italian fishermen and other rescuers) were transferred between 2018 and 2023.

Frontex regularly shares the position of migrant boats with the LCG more systematically than it has with rescue ships. From 2017, the EU supported Libya in coordinating rescues in an enlarged search region, ceding its own responsibilities. Yet Libya is also a state that cannot provide most basic services to its people, of whom over 40 percent are below the poverty line. “There used to be a bad joke that the Coast Guard was [Libya’s] only functioning public institution,” SARCO Chloe Haralambous told me two years ago.

“And the point of it was that its skill sets, its know-how, were all provided by Europe.”

This incident will have wider repercussions for parliaments returning after the summer holidays.

Externalization — the outsourcing of migration control to other, generally less well-off countries —  is being pursued aggressively across Europe.

Britain’s Keir Starmer is full of praise for Italy’s model and has recently begun shipping surveillance equipment to Tunisia’s coast guard, which has also been noted for its violence against people crossing. Greece, Germany, and Italy among others are eyeing further deals.

And the European Commission’s new €1 trillion budget proposal contains an explicit assumption that African countries will be expected to control migration in return for receiving the shrinking available development aid. (Libyan forces have previously been funded from “development” budgets.)

But these costly relationships are also coming off the rails. Italy is still reeling from twin scandals over its freeing of a Libyan war criminal, and spyware attacks on activists including rescue NGO staff and David Yambio of grassroots advocacy group Refugees in Libya.

In June, migrant arrivals to the Greek islands of Crete and Gavdos began to increase, in what rescue NGO Civil MRCC dubbed further evidence that violent migration controls simply push people onto different routes.

Greece rushed to send warships to the Libyan coast and then to suspend the right to asylum for maritime arrivals from North Africa altogether, in what Greek MEP Kostas Arvanitis called “a decision outside every letter of international law and the European acquis,” referring to the bloc’s built-up body of law.

Accompanied by a Greek delegation, EU migration commissioner and Austrian right-winger Magnus Brunner rushed to Libya to demand more border-control efforts.

Instead, Brunner found himself caught in a diplomatic ambush by the government in the east and ignominiously thrown out of the country. Europe’s border-control diplomacy — part of its wider and even more chaotic Great Game–esque geopolitical maneuvering against its rivals in North Africa — had come unstuck once again.

Now a new problem for Brussels has emerged in the form of a floating crime scene full of bullet holes.

“The EU has . . . failed to address Libya’s political stability and rule of law crisis,” says Tilley:

Impunity and criminality continue to permeate the ranks [of Libyan authorities] through a system of detention, violence and ransom. This escalation on the high seas presents a dangerous risk, not only for NGOs, but also for the innocent passage of commercial vessels through some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.

What happens next “will be entirely dictated by the EU,” says Tilley. “They have full discretion here.”

They may decide that this is unacceptable and, through sanctions or withholding pledged donations, pressure Tripoli to stop. . . . If they do this, I’ve no doubt we would see the crew [involved in the shooting] punished in some way. But it may be that the deterrent effect is cynically and quietly tolerated and there is at most a statement of condemnation.

The Ocean Viking is only a single exhibit in a wider crime scene that spans the Mediterranean from the Libyan coastline to the Gaza Strip.

But it is one that forces an explicit choice on European states: Will they end their relationships with out-of-control security forces, or will they effectively decriminalize violence and piracy against their own citizens at sea?

The multinational crew — with Italy, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Greece, Belgium, Sweden, Finland, and New Zealand all represented — may also expect their governments to intervene against the violations of their rights at sea.

Clara Bünger, a German MP, as well as calling on the EU to end any support for the LCG, adds that “in solidarity, Germany should also reverse its decision to cut funding for maritime rescue.” Under right-wing pressure, Berlin ended its €2 million support for civil SAR earlier this year.

Meanwhile, the civil fleet will face tough choices about the trade-offs between their operational capability and safety requirements.

As Tilley adds, “Lots of the other ships are privately chartered, and other interested parties have a say; the liabilities facing NGOs are big, and they have limited security options — they can’t employ armed protection. But equally, they are robust and may decide to proceed regardless.”

The Ocean Viking crew remains defiant. “[The attack] makes me more motivated to spread the word,” says Ayla. “Am I living in a parallel universe? I can’t comprehend why more people are not more shocked and affected that their taxes are funding this. But it doesn’t change my motivation to sail.”

“This is why we’re out here.”