Next Steps In The Ghost Boat Investigation
Your hard work’s been recognized as some of the best in the world. But now we have to make our search for the truth really count.
When we started searching for 243 refugees who disappeared while making the perilous journey to Europe, we knew it was going to be tough. Almost everything about these people and their story was hard to trace — their movements, their routes, even their identities. The difficulties that made the investigation important were the exact same things that made it so easy for the authorities — and the world at large — to ignore.
But we were motivated to tackle this daunting search by the sense of abandonment that the families left behind felt. “Two hundred and forty-three people disappeared… No one cares about it,” Yafet told us back in our first episode. His wife Segen and daughter Abi have now been missing for a year and a half. Nobody is looking except family members, and us.
We haven’t solved the mystery of what happened to the Ghost Boat yet. But time and again, the families of the missing have told us how it brings them some comfort to know their story is finally out there, and that people are searching for answers.
Along the way, we have had amazing support. That includes the many, many Medium users who helped dig up vital pieces of information, and those who helped translate our story into many languages; It goes from the students at Columbia Journalism School and CUNY who took part in our physical workshop, to non-profits and advocacy groups like Amnesty and the International Rescue Committee, which have helped us spread the word. And, of course, it includes the relatives and friends who have sent us invaluable information and kept us in line along the way.
Every one of the tens of thousands of people who read the story became part of it. Just yesterday the project was nominated for a reporting prize in the prestigious National Magazine Awards — up against work from the likes of the The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic.
Even so, we are all frustrated.
Our attempt to locate the Ghost Boat has proven even harder than we imagined, as promising leads turned to dead ends and stories turned out to be rumors. In particular we hit a roadblock in Libya, a country in disarray as rival governments and local militias struggle against each other.
This kind of stop/start activity is not unusual for investigative journalism, but still… it was not where we wanted to be.
The difficulties came to a climax in November and December, when our attempts to find out more truly ground to a halt. We hoped that interviewing the smugglers would help clarify some important pieces of information, and kickstart a new part of the investigation. But were stymied by the legal process in Italy, and kept waiting, and waiting… and waiting.
This hunt consumed us. We kept looking for answers in the places where they were the most impossible to find.
If you have been following along, you probably noticed this slowdown. Other people certainly did, and rightly questioned whether we’d messed it up. That’s when we decided to take a step back.
Now we’re ready to carry on the search, and we think we can do it together.
We’ve spent the last few weeks organizing the next phase of this investigation. We now have a reporter in Libya, Mohamed Lagha, who is doing amazing work that we are desperate to share with everybody. We’ve identified satellite imagery of the region that might help us pinpoint some critical information and plot the movements of the Ghost Boat. And we know there’s a rich community of people who care — people right here, reading this — and who can help guide us through.
So, this next phase will be focused on trying to pinpoint the location of where the boat might have gone down. We’re still working on verifying whether the boat actually left the coast, but if it did we should be able to narrow down a search area based on the data and reporting we already have. As crazy as it may sound, this might now be our best hope of finding some solid evidence.
On Monday, we’ll start sharing the new material we’ve gathered, and new information we’re coming across every day. We’ll be asking you to jump back into the search for the missing people, and we’ll bring in our partners, researchers and experts to see if we can finally the answers we’ve all been searching for.
Thanks.
The Ghost Boat team
