Quelle: The Independent

by Lizzie Dearden

Disturbing footage has emerged appearing to show Syrian asylum seekers swimming around the bodies of dead migrants to reach safety on a Greek island.

The 30-second clip shows one man wading out of the water carrying two crying children at sunrise.

“Come on baby, we made it, thank God,” he can be heard saying, according to a translation by Kusai Kedri.

What appears to be the bodies of at least three dead migrants can be seen floating in the background as another survivor stops in the shallows and speaks to the camera.

„One day we will tell our children how we found refuge in Europe and how Syrians have drowned,” he says.

„One day we our children will grow up and say ‘down with Arab rulers!’”

The authenticity of the video could not be confirmed but Sakir Khader, a journalist for Dutch newspaper Volkskrant who posted it on Twitter on Sunday, said it showed a “number of Syrian migrants between the bodies of drowned refugees off the coast of Greece”.

The Independent has tried to contacted Mr Khader for more information.

It came as the bodies of 49 migrants found in the hold of a smugglers’ ship north of Libya were brought ashore in Sicily after they reportedly suffocated in the vessel’s packed hold.

Conflict in Libya and a series of disasters on the treacherous Mediterranean crossing is driving increasing numbers of migrants to reach Europe by making the shorter voyage from Turkey to Greek islands in the Aegean Sea.

Local authorities, who have been heavily criticised by international aid agencies for their response to hundreds of thousands of arrivals this year, have resorted to housing asylum seekers on a passenger ship docked in Kos.

At least 124,000 migrants arrived by sea in Greece in the first seven months of this year, according to the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR).
Most reached Lesbos, while many other landings were in Kos and the Dodecanese islands, Chios, Samos and Crete.

More than 2,000 people have died crossing the Mediterranean this year, in what EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos called the “worst refugee crisis since the Second World War.”