Shocker! How Three Men Survived For 24 Hours In A Fuel Tank
Three refugees from the war in Syria met in Turkey and crossed into
Greece – but they wanted to go further. With money running out and their
families in Turkey relying on them to find a new home, they made a
last-ditch attempt to get into Italy. Said tells their story.
We knew the fuel tank was a bad way to go. There
were Syrian guys who had tried it before and they all said, “Don’t do
it!”
But we were desperate to get out of Greece. I’d been stuck there for
two months, living in a flat in Athens with Anas and Badi. There was no
work, no help, no way to survive. The police were hassling us every day,
aggressive as hell. “Where are your papers? Where are your papers?”
The traffickers sat around in the cafes, Kurdish and Arab guys
mainly, talking quite openly about the ways they could get people into
other Western European countries. By plane. By boat. In the fuel tank of
a lorry.
The fuel tank was the worst, but it was a surefire way to get in.
“You might be a corpse by the time you arrive,” they said, “but you’ll
get there.”
Many lorries have two fuel tanks, but may only need one
The guy who told us about the lorry was an Egyptian who ran an
internet cafe near Omonia Square. The cafe was just a front for the
smuggling operation, really. A lot of Arab kids would be in there
talking to their parents on Skype, and he would listen in to find out
who was trying to get into France or Italy. He told us he knew a Greek
driver going to Milan. For 5,000 euros (£3,630, $5,386) each, he could
take four of us in the second fuel tank.
We left Athens in a taxi, me and Badi and Anas and an Iraqi guy who
we didn’t really know. The driver took us to a warehouse in an
industrial zone outside Thessaloniki, not far from the sea. The lorry
was hidden inside and the driver shut the warehouse doors so no-one
could see what was going on.
He told us all to go to the toilet before we got in. The other guys all took a leak, but I just couldn’t go. I was too tense.
We had to get into the tank by crawling under the axle of the lorry
and squeezing through this tiny door. As soon as I saw it I thought,
“We’re going to die in there.”
When we’d taken a look we scrambled back out from under the lorry and
prayed, there on the floor of the warehouse. We prayed for our
children, all four of us together. Then we crammed ourselves into the
tank and the driver started the engines.
As soon as the lorry started to move we knew we wouldn’t last an
hour. It was burning hot and filled with diesel fumes. Anas was frantic,
banging on the tank and screaming this weird scream. The driver heard
him and the lorry stopped before it had left the warehouse. We scrambled
out. Anas said, “I have kids, I don’t want to die.”
The Italians were so kind to us -they actually took us by the hand, physically took our hands, and led us to the restaurant
There was no way all four of us could go in that tank, so we agreed
that the Iraqi guy would go back to Athens. The rest of us had been
together for months. We were like brothers. We trusted each other.
The driver was going to lose 5,000 euros, but he didn’t want to
arrive with a bunch of dead bodies in the tank. So he squeezed an extra
500 euros out of the three of us and we got back in.
Within an hour, I needed to pee so badly it hurt. We were squished
together like dough. There was a rubber sheet on the floor of the tank
and it just melted in the heat. I mean it turned to liquid. We were
covered in this black stuff. It was like an oven, pitch black. It stank
of melting plastic and diesel fumes. I was 100% certain that we were
going to die.
We had a small plastic Pepsi bottle with us, and Badi and Anas
managed to pee in it. Well, half of it went in the bottle and half of it
went everywhere, all over their clothes and on to the floor of the tank
with the melted rubber. Badi emptied the bottle outside the tank, but
the lorry was going fast and the wind blew the spray back inside.
Where are Syrian migrants trying to go?
Said en route
Syrian refugees often enter the EU in Italy or Greece, but most would
prefer to get to a country with more jobs and better social welfare.
Police harassment can also be a problem.
The most popular countries are in northern Europe.
The UK, the
Netherlands, Germany, and the Scandinavian states are all seen as places
that offer a degree of support to asylum seekers and provide migrants
with a chance of finding work.
Professional migrant smugglers operate all over Europe, the Middle
East, and North Africa. Some advertise their services and answer
enquiries on Facebook.
Desperate migrants often pass huge sums of money, saved over years of
work or borrowed from families, into the hands of criminal smuggling
gangs.
By then I was really in agony, but I just couldn’t pee in that bottle
with my friends there. Towards the end of the journey the pain was so
bad that I was actually blacking out. I tried to keep quiet for their
sakes, but all the way I was screaming inside.
After a while the lorry drove on to a ferry. Without the engine noise
we were scared they’d hear us, so we never said a word except when the
lorry was going fast. We just stayed there silently, listening to the
boat’s engines and struggling to breathe.
None of us thought we’d make it. I had my mobile in my hand and I
kept looking at the screen in the darkness, looking at photos of my wife
and my girls. I have twin girls, Deema and Reema. They’re four years
old. I did this whole journey just for them. I left Syria to get my
girls out of this war. I just kept thinking, “How are they going to
survive if I don’t make it?”
We had another girl on the way, too. I’d already seen the ultrasound
in Turkey, so we knew it was a girl. I just lay there looking at my
family on the phone and wondering if God would give me life to see that
baby. In the end the battery died.
Finally the engines started again and we started to move, slowly
slowly slowly. When we stopped we could hear men talking loudly outside –
“Buongiorno! Grazie! Prego! Grazie!” – and we knew we were in Italy. We
were relieved, because whatever happened we would not be sent back to
Greece.
The driver was supposed to take us to Milan but after a few more
hours we just couldn’t stand it any more. We started banging on the side
of the tank, yelling, but he didn’t hear us or he didn’t want to stop.
Badi still had some juice in his phone, so he called the trafficker
in Athens from inside the tank and said, “Call the driver and tell him
to let us out or we’re going to die in here.” Not long after that the
driver turned off the big road and after a while he stopped.
The special shoes
We collapsed out of the tank on to the floor. We couldn’t unfold our
legs, couldn’t even feel them, so we had to drag ourselves out from
under the lorry with our hands. It was the middle of the day. We were in
a wood somewhere in Italy.
The driver made it clear that he no longer knew us, that we were on
our own. After he drove off we rolled down a slope and crawled into a
concrete storm tunnel under the road. We just lay in there trying to
move our limbs and to breathe. After 10 minutes, lying there on my side,
I managed to take a pee.
When we got our breath back we sat up and looked at each other. And
then we really laughed, because we were covered in black melted rubber
and we stank. We stripped of our shirts and turned them inside out and
used them to clean off the worst of it. We’d each brought a small bag
with a change of clothes, so we got into clean shirts and left the old
ones in the tunnel.
We had no idea where we were. Badi used the GPS on his phone to find a
village, and we started walking towards it. There were vineyards
everywhere, and after a while we saw farms. When cars came past we were
scared that the villagers would report us to the police as they had in
Greece, so we turned our backs on the cars and pointed at the scenery,
acting as though were tourists out for a stroll in the hills.
When we got into the village we had to ask for help. We hadn’t eaten
or drunk anything for 24 hours. The other guys pushed me to the front,
because I was the whitest and the most educated. I have a degree in
economics, and a bit of English, and I’d learned a few Italian words
before we set off. So I had to do the talking.
The Italians were so kind to us. They actually took us by the hand,
physically took our hands, and led us to the restaurant. It was closed,
so we went to a cafe instead.
There was nothing to eat in there. The waiter brought us coffee and
water. The water was fizzy. I had never had fizzy water before, and I
just couldn’t drink it. So we drank the coffee. It was espresso. Black.
Bitter. That was the next time we laughed. We survived the fuel tank, we
said, but this coffee’s going to kill us.
Said split up with Anas and Badi (the narrator of the video, above)
in Italy. He took a train over the Alps and arrived in Vienna. Anas
bought a fake passport from smugglers in Italy and used it to fly to
Sweden. His cousin, Badi, was eventually able to join a cousin in Leeds.
All three have been granted asylum.
As soon as he was settled, Said sent for his family. Almost a year
earlier he’d left a wife and twin daughters in Turkey. They arrived in
Austria carrying a new member of the family – Mais, the baby that Said
feared he’d never see.
He told his story to Daniel Silas Adamson and Mamdouh Akbiek of the BBC World Service.
