"I put the child by my side on the boat to grab the rope, but when I turned to him he had disappeared"

March 04, 2019

Credits: مهاجر نيوز

Two years ago, Sissoko, a 31-year-old male from Mali, tried to cross the Mediterranean. Out of 129 people on the boat with him, 62 died, including all children.

"In November 2016, I had been in Libya for several months, and I couldn't do anything." Libyans shot on me, I had a bullet in the hip and a bone fracture.

My boss told me: You are seriously injured, you either go back to Mali or you go to have treatments in Europe. The idea of going to Europe never came to me before. I could not return to Mali or stay there. So I decided to cross the Mediterranean.

The departure was scheduled on 24 Novembe, in the evening. Three smugglers carried me to the boat and I felt my bones moving out of place. I screamed, I was in pain. They told me to be silent, they didn't want anyone to notice our presence.

There was nothing. No banks, no beaches, no lifeboats.

130 people took that little boat with me. They put me between the children in the middle of the boat so that my feet remained steady. At midnight, they pushed the boat towards the sea. The smuggler told us that after three hours we would have seen boats coming to help us.

We sailed for a very long time into the dark. At 7 am, when the sun began to rise high in the sky, we looked around, there was nothing.

There was someone holding a compass, but he did not know how to use it. The person driving the boat told us that the engine was no longer working.