| Pakistani citizens accounted for the largest number of victims in the recent migrant boat disaster. DW spoke with victims’ families about why so many are choosing to risk their lives for an uncertain future in Europe.
Read Haroon Janjua’s report from Khuiratta
On the evening of June 14, Muhammad Gulfam was at home in a rural mountain village in northern Pakistan when he received a call from his cousin about a migrant boat that had capsized that day off the coast of Greece.
His younger brother, Aakash Gulzar, had been on board. Jobless, and without many prospects in cash-strapped Pakistan, 21-year-old Gulzar had made up his mind that he would pay smugglers to embark on a monthslong journey across thousands of miles through arduous land and sea routes to Italy.
The journey was not cheap, and Gulzar’s family had cobbled together €7,000 ($7,640) to pay a trafficking agent to smuggle him to Europe, where they hoped he would find a better life.
Late one afternoon in March, Gulzar hugged his mother and brothers goodbye and set off.
“We don’t want it to be the final goodbye, we want to see him again and we hope he is one of the injured in the hospital,” Gulfam told DW.
Naseem Begum, Gulzar’s mother, said she had spoken to her son on the phone before he boarded the overloaded vessel.
“My son requested prayers on the phone call and said ‘I will call you after reaching my destination,'” Begum told DW.
Witness accounts described the vessel carrying Gulzar as a 30-meter (100-foot)-long fishing boat that was crammed with over 700 people. It had departed from Libya and sank 50 miles (80.5 kilometers) off the coast of Pylos, a small Greek coastal town on the Ionian Sea.
Gulzar is still missing and presumed dead.
Read the rest of Haroon’s report |
