After a weekend of digging around, things are going full throttle in the search for a boat full of missing refugees. Episode 2 is closing in on completion, Eric and Gianni are in southern Tunisia chasing leads, and Meron has been in Italy interviewing refugees. If you’re audio-inclined you can hear Eric talking with Scott Simon on NPR’s Weekend Edition.

This Just In

Here’s some fresh new data to sift through: maritime reports from the U.S. National Geospatial Intelligence Agency. Take a look — there appear to be a number of cases similar to the one we’re looking at, but we need to understand them, and discover how best to interpret them.

Mark Taylor asks an important question: “How do you know it was a single boat?” The short answer is: We don’t know for sure, although we do have some indication from conversations with Measho and Ibrahim, two of the smugglers — though obviously they are not exactly trustworthy sources. The boat is one of the things that Noah Caldwell digs into in a useful post on “What Kind of Vessel Was The Ghost Boat?” In it, he points out that refugee craft generally divide into two types: inflatables that carry up to around 140 people, and fishing boats that carry 350+. The Ghost Boat sits right in the middle. Does that actually mean it was two boats?

Not so fast. Our own Eric Reidy points out something new: The number of people on the boat may have actually been much higher than we thought. The 243 “reflects the number of people who paid for passage. Young children and others, such as people working for the smuggler who didn’t have to pay, were not included in the count.” So perhaps we’re actually talking closer to 300 people; in which case, a single fishing boat is a definite possibility.

Meanwhile dangersquirrel points to relevant news reports from the period, noting that “June 2014 was the height of Operation Mare Nostrum, the rescue operation conducted by the Italian Navy.”

Morsels

Ross Whiteford pointed to recent maritime intelligence assessments around Libya. Can we dig up historical reports? dangersquirrel asks: Could this photograph be Segen and Abi? Seems like a longshot, but we’re checking in with UNHCR.

Onward.

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