Ray Bugeja’s father was left asking himself what he did wrong when six soldiers armed with machine guns boarded his fishing boat after he had assisted migrants. The incident happened some years back when the fishing boat with five crew members stopped to help migrants in distress.

After informing the Maltese authorities, the crew provided water and food and watched over the migrant boat until an army patrol boat arrived on the scene.

It was after the patrol boat took on the migrants that six soldiers on a dinghy boarded the fishing vessel, separated the boat master from the rest of the crew and conducted a search of the vessel.

Mr Bugeja, a veteran fisherman and National Fisheries Cooperative secretary, got a flashback of this incident when asked for his reaction to a maritime expert’s statement last week that ship captains feared the legal hassle that followed after helping refugees.

“Unfortunately, the fear is a reality even among fishermen,” Mr Bugeja said. He recalled his father’s shock at being greeted by machine-gun wielding soldiers as if they had done something wrong. It was such instances that forced boat masters into thinking twice about rescuing migrants, he added. “Unfortunately, fishermen end up asking themselves whether they need this hassle when all they did was save people from drowning,” he said.

Under the International Law of the Sea, mariners are obliged to give assistance in cases where people are in danger at sea.

But speaking at a seminar in Malta last week, Captain Wolf-Peter Rabitz said some merchant vessels failed to assist migrants because of the legal difficulties that ensued when it came to their disembarkation.

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