The Lost Boat

ON A GLOOMY AFTERNOON on 20 January last year, a decomposed corpse washed up on the beach of the five-star Lykia World Antalya golf and hotel resort in Manavgat, Turkey. It was winter, and the resort was empty of guests. Staff members spotted a flash of red clothing at the water’s edge. When we visited the hotel last July, an employee produced a photo of the body. It showed skeletal remains protruding from a red t-shirt or dress. They couldn't say whether workers snapped the picture before or after they called the police.

A kilometre down the road, the muhtar of the Denizkent neighbourhood, Abdurrahman Erdoğan, heard about the body and drove to the hotel. He later told Turkey’s Hurriyet newspaper: “It was clear that it was human just from the bones. I saw it, too. It really was like a horror movie.”

In the following weeks, more corpses were discovered scattered along the Antalya coastline and in Muğla to the west – each reported to be in various states of dismemberment. Turkey’s tabloids and social media speculated wildly: Were the victims fleeing Palestinians bombed by Israel? Did Turkey have a serial killer on its hands? One local lifeguard from the nearby Adalya Elite Lara hotel, where another body was found, suggested to us that a cannibal cult of ultra-rich and famous celebrities was to blame, and mentioned Madonna.

Soon reports began to link the bodies to others found in Cyprus, Northern Cyprus, and Syria, and Turkey’s morbid fascination with the dead quickly faded. There was now a simpler explanation: migrants.

When we talked to muhtar Erdoğan in Denizkent months later, he denied being at the scene, saying the gendarmerie had prevented him from entering the grounds. It was unimportant what he did or did not see, though. “We heard that they were probably Syrian refugees. So we didn't care at all.”

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Evening, 11 December 2023, Lebanon – In the small fishing village of Cheikh Zennad, a couple of hours north of Beirut, around 250 men, women, and children waited to board four boats for a crossing to Cyprus. Almost all of them were Syrian, save for a few Lebanese and Palestinians. Many had been holding up in the nearby port town of Tripoli for days.

Winter crossings had been a rare occurrence. The rougher weather in these months makes the sea unpredictable. But an increase in hostilities against Syrians in Lebanon, driven by anti-refugee policies, had tipped the balance. Syrians were taking bigger risks.

One by one over the next few hours, the boats set out into the Mediterranean night. The next evening, three of them arrived in Ayia Napa, the closest stretch of European Union land to Lebanon. The fourth vessel, a fishing boat named Princess Lulu, carrying 85 people, 35 of them children, never reached the island.

Authorities were alerted early on to the chance that migrants were in danger, though none launched a search and rescue effort. Eighteen months later, there has been no formal investigation anywhere to ascertain their fate. Not in Lebanon, where the boat departed, or in Cyprus, which under Search and Rescue agreements bears responsibility for the southeast Mediterranean, where the boat disappeared.

In the shadow of the institutional lethargy are dozens of grieving families who, for more than a year and a half, have searched desperately for answers about what happened to their loved ones aboard the Princess Lulu. Their torment is deepened by conflicting traces of evidence—some suggesting the passengers may have reached Cyprus, others indicating a tragedy along the way.

The absence of mobilisation to find the passengers stands in stark contrast to the efforts and global media coverage of two maritime disasters in the months before and after the migrant boat went missing, when the Titan submarine vanished in the Atlantic Ocean and the luxury yacht of a British tech entrepreneur sank off the coast of Sicily. In those cases, the missing were wealthy.

The Black Sea travelled to Turkey, Cyprus, and Lebanon to piece together the story of the Princess Lulu and establish any connection to the corpses that washed up across Mediterranean shores.

We reconstructed the events using testimony from family members, lawyers, and activists. We collected the videos, texts, and voice messages sent by passengers in the final hours before contact was lost. What emerges is a portrait of indifference: smugglers that lied, agencies that failed in their duties, and governments that refuse to account for nearly a hundred missing human beings.

Bodies began washing up around the Mediterranean in the weeks after the Princess Lulu disappeared.
Two in Syria, in the town of Al Hamidiyah, in Tartus, on December 24.
A woman's body washed up in Köyceğiz, Muğla, on 6 January.
Two days later, on 8 January 2024, a man's body was found on the shore of Bafra, in Northern Cyprus, followed by five more corpses across the coastline, on 14 and 22 January, and 5 February.
On 23 April, half of a woman's body was discovered on the coast of Agia Thekla, Cyprus.
The bodies began to appear in Antalya, Turkey, on 17 January, when a child was found on the beach in the Çenger neighbourhood of Manavgat.
The next day, another child was found in Alanya. Two more were soon discovered in Çenger. On 20 January, the body clothed in red washed up at the hotel in Denizkent.
In total, 20 bodies were found across the Mediterranean.
PART ONE: "THE SEA IS CALM, AND THE JOURNEY IS PEACEFUL"
THE PRINCESS LULU WAS THE LAST of the four boats to depart Cheikh Zennad, setting out around 1:00 a.m. on Tuesday, 12 December. The journey was expected to take less than a day. As they sailed out into the dark, passengers sent text and voice messages to their loved ones. The mood was light and optimistic. Some had warned that they might lose contact once they entered international waters. Others that smugglers had confiscated SIM cards.

Among the 85 on the Princess Lulu was Mohammad al-Khasawneh, a 19-year-old computer science student from Daraa, who left his home in Syria with his 17-year-old cousin, Nidal Yehya Shahadat, a few days before departure. “They left Daraa on Friday,” his mother, Wafaa al-Hilal, said. “By Monday night, before we knew it, they were gone.”

Wafaa calls him “Hamada.” She describes him as “a piece of my heart.” He was the smartest of all her children, the only one to go to university. “He is very calm, God bless him. Smart,” she said. “He had different hobbies; drawing, writing, designing.”

Hamada was engaged to a local girl from Daraa, but at their parents’ request, they agreed he would finish his studies first. Relatives in Cyprus arranged the journey through brokers, promising he could enrol at university once he arrived there.

Before Hamada left, his fiancée had gifted him a bracelet inscribed with the Ayat al-Kursi, a popular passage from the Quran often recited before journeys for protection. It would later prove to be an important clue.

Hamada

nidal2

Mohammad al-Khasawneh

Nidal Yehya Shahadat

Omar al-Barhoum was also aboard the boat. A 31-year-old construction worker from Idlib and a father of eight, Omar had a brother and a sister waiting for him in Cyprus. As the passengers departed, he sent light-hearted messages to his sister, Rana.

“Pray for me. We’re about to enter territorial waters, and I’ll lose signal soon.” Then jokingly added, “Don’t forget to get me fried chicken in case we arrive safely. Pray for us and [I] hope to see you soon.

In a bungalow in Limassol, Cyprus, Omar’s brother Ibrahim sat among half a dozen other men whose families had been lost on the Princess Lulu. To this day, they argue about its fate.

Ibrahim had been smuggled across the Mediterranean five years earlier on an old, overloaded vessel that began to sink with 105 people on board. He was stranded for three days. “We did not have food, only water. We did not sleep. We did not eat.” He barely survived. When he heard that his brother was planning to make the trip, he begged him not to come: “I told Omar the route is dangerous,” but he didn’t listen. He thought Ibrahim was lying and was desperate to be with his brother.

Ibrahim holds out his phone and plays the last messages Omar sent to his mother in the early hours of that Tuesday morning. "We have biscuits and some supplies on the boat. Go to sleep, Mom. They gave us car tyres to inflate,” he said. “My brother Ibrahim was telling me not to come; the sea is rough. He did not want me to go to sea. He was lying to me; the sea is calm, and the journey is peaceful."

“​​My brother is my companion,” Ibrahim said. “I cry for him every day. I cannot bear to talk to my children [about it]. My mother still doesn't know. She has heart disease. We told her he was at the police station under investigation and cannot talk. We suffer every day.”

Ibrahim believes his brother reached Cyprus. To support this, he shows us a video taken by another passenger on board the Princess Lulu. “Look at this video; they are happy at sea. There is no drowning or anything; the sea was calm.”

The clip shows young men laughing and joking, the morning sunrise at their backs, having made it through an uncertain night at sea. Around their waists, they wear inflated inner tubes instead of proper life jackets, just as Omar had mentioned in his messages to his mother.

"If they send us back from Cyprus, it’s because of this guy,” one laughs, gesturing to a man named Hazouri, who smiles and waves. “Hazouri spent his time sleeping,” he adds.

Relatives confirmed their names: Mohammad Ezzo, Khaled Mohamid, Bakr al-Erq, Abdulrahman Najm, Mohammad Najm and Anas al-Hazouri, who they call Hazouri. (Ezzo isn’t listed among the missing, but sources assured us he was on the boat.)

The man holding the phone is 25-year-old Fouad Hanadi.

In Lebanon, Fatima Hanadi said that her son Fouad had fled the country “because he couldn't bear the racism here. Because he is Syrian, they don't want him. They accuse him of taking jobs from the Lebanese." On the morning he left, she held back her emotions. “I didn't want to make him feel sad. I didn't walk with him to the car. Why? I regret this deeply. I wish I had hugged him."

The video, sent at 6.50 a.m., is the last confirmed communication with the Princess Lulu.

Left to right: Mohammad Ezzo, Khaled Mohamid, Bakr al-Erq, Fouad Hanadi. Behind: Anas Hazzouri, Abdulrahman Najm, Mohammad Najm.

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Just after 2 p.m. on Tuesday, 12 December, the Cyprus Port and Marine Police spotted the first boat ten miles from Ayia Napa. Then two more over the next two hours. By evening, all three had been intercepted and escorted to shore. The Cyprus Mail reported the arrival of 170 passengers at Cape Greco, who were transferred to the Pournara First Reception Centre, a refugee camp outside Nicosia, close to midnight.

The news that migrant boats had reached Cyprus brought waves of relief to relatives. Smugglers and brokers sent messages to confirm their arrival.

Sherine al-Ali was travelling on the Princess Lulu with her two young children, Ibrahim and Ahmad, aged five and six. At 11:30 p.m., her brother and sister received messages from her WhatsApp account: she had arrived safely.

Meanwhile, her husband, Mahmoud al-Mohamad, already in Cyprus, had rushed to the Pournara camp to greet his wife and kids: “I watched as one by one people got off the buses,” he told us. But Sherine and the boys weren’t among them. Nor were her father, Hassan, and brother, Hussein, who’d accompanied them.

An hour passed with no news. Mahmoud approached the security guard. “[The passengers] have arrived, but my kids aren’t among them,” he told him. The guard reassured him that there were “still about 100 people on another boat in the harbour who haven’t come here yet.”

Mahmoud would wait at the camp for the next week.

Ibrahim and Ahmed

Wajdi Rizk

Ahmed and Ibrahim al-Mohamad

Wajdi Rizk

When Diaa Rizk learned that nearly 200 migrants had reached Ayia Napa, he assumed his 28-year-old uncle, Wajdi Rizk, was with them. He’d last heard from Wajdi almost 24 hours earlier in a brief text from another passenger’s phone as the boat left:

“Everyone is fine, and we will set off.”

“I headed to the refugee shelter in Cyprus, the Pournara Camp,” he said. “They told me that three boats had arrived from Lebanon that day. They tried to help me by taking my uncle's name and searching for him, but they said he hadn't arrived.”

The hours turned into days. It was now clear that something was wrong. Diaa, Mahmoud, and other relatives began alerting the UN and government agencies, warning of a potentially grave situation but received no information. There was an uneasy feeling that the boat had never completed its journey.

The families reached Taim Ali of the Consolidated Rescue Group, a Syrian volunteer team that alerts authorities to emergencies at sea. “We immediately reported the case to the authorities in Lebanon, Cyprus, Turkish Cyprus, and across the region,” he said. “But sadly, we received no serious response.”

Ali reached out to Alarm Phone, another network of volunteers that monitors a telephone hotline for migrants in distress. “We asked them to help because there were 85 people on board – real lives at risk,” he said. “When we escalate like this and get more people involved, it creates more pressure on the authorities to act.”

The passengers had now been missing for four days.

Alarm Phone’s Corinna Zeitz said, “This was a different way from how we [normally] get cases.” People crossing the Mediterranean usually know about the emergency numbers, she said, but with the Princess Lulu, no one on the boat had gotten in touch. She also notified the Cyprus Coast Guard and other relevant authorities in Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, but again, no one took action.

Coastguards and maritime agencies, including the EU’s Frontex, are legally obligated to aid those in distress at sea. Under the International Maritime Organisation’s Search and Rescue Zones agreements, Cyprus has jurisdiction over most of the waters between it and Lebanon.

The Larnaca Joint Rescue Coordination Center, run by the Ministry of Defence, exists to direct rescue agencies in mobilising resources such as real-time radar and aerial surveillance. It should inform coastguards and nearby commercial and private vessels of any potential emergencies. Several NGOs also operate migrant rescue boats.

News and human rights organisations have long accused maritime agencies in the Mediterranean of systemic abuses of migrants at sea that experts believe have become unofficial EU policy: forced returns, pushbacks, and other violations of international law, including potentially criminal actions that caused migrant deaths.

The Larnaca JRCC took no action.

Then reports began to come in that the boat had been rescued. The Cyprus Port and Marine Police “confirmed this as well,” said Zeitz. “This was really the crucial problem in the first place,” she added. “And so we closed the case in the beginning. Because we thought, ‘Okay, most probably it's closed.’”

Part of the confusion was caused by the arrival of another boat of 75 refugees on 16 December. But it soon became clear that the reassurances were false. “It was the families who told us: ‘No, we have to search for a match of the names,’” said Zeitz. “There was already a list of passengers, and they weren’t on the boats that arrived.”

To make matters worse, the smugglers in Lebanon were telling families that the passengers had arrived safely hours after they had disappeared. “The first two and three days we were blind,” said Diaa. “The smugglers' story was that they arrived, but they didn't know anything.”

Although the main concern was that the passengers had suffered an accident at sea and needed help, there was also the fear that authorities were preparing to deport them to Lebanon.

Efforts to organise search parties and official investigations went nowhere. “Cyprus almost completely shut down the case,” said Ali. “From what we understand, the calls we were receiving indicated that the boat was already in Cypriot waters. But to Cyprus, it was just another boat coming from Lebanon.”

Taim Ali believes there is something odd about the whole situation. “Honestly, I can’t explain it clearly, but it feels off. It’s like the boat got close to Cyprus… and then everything just stopped. That’s my personal sense of it. I don’t have full proof, but something doesn’t add up.”

The lack of transparency from authorities, combined with false assurances from smugglers, created a fog of confusion for the families.

Soon, the smugglers began to change their stories.

A video taken by one of the passengers on the Princess Lulu

A SMUGGLER'S PARADISE
THOSE ABOARD THE PRINCESS LULU had paid thousands of dollars to a smuggling network based in Tripoli. In recent years, the town has become a key launch point for crossings to Europe, attracting a booming trade of migrants, brokers, and smugglers.

Diaa told us that Wajdi’s journey had started weeks earlier, when he left his home in Syria and crossed into Lebanon with the help of a man called Abu Saif. Abu Saif’s real name was Khaled al-Mahamid. He worked as a smuggler out of Wadi Khaled, near the northern border, but also connected migrants with the men who could take them out of Lebanon by boat.

While Wajdi waited in Beirut, Diaa arranged with Abu Saif to meet a bagman in Cyprus. He handed over $3,100 in cash. The payment was routed through al-Taj, a travel agency in Damascus, to an associate who worked with Abu Saif and another broker, Hekmat al-Arak, known as Abu Fahd. Saif promised to hold the money until Wajdi reached Cyprus safely. Only then would he pay the main smugglers.

“Abu Saif then took my uncle to the meeting place in Tripoli, to the home of Abu Fahd,” Diaa said. But after ten days, Lebanese police caught Wajdi and sent him back to Syria. He spent a week in jail until Abu Saif paid $500 to get him out and smuggled him back into Lebanon.

“He stayed at Abu Saif's house in Wadi Khaled for about a week and then went back down to Tripoli,” he said, to Abu Fahd’s house, where he waited for nearly a month until more passengers arrived and boats could be secured.

We reached Abu Saif by phone. He sounded nervous. He admitted to ferrying Syrians across the border into Lebanon and helping Wajdi get out of jail, though he denied any direct role in the smuggling. “When you go and put this out in the media, that’s a disaster,” he said.

He told us he had no knowledge of the boat's whereabouts. “I don’t know where the boat is, and I have my relatives on it.” He would not say who they were, or whether they were crew or passengers.

“I’m a man whose job is at the border,” he said. “People know me well.” Yes, sometimes “people entrust me with their money,” but these are just guarantees, favours for people who pass through his home. “The idea that I’m the one putting people on boats or requesting that is not true.” He never leaves Wadi Khaled. “My job is just to get them there, nothing more, nothing less.”

“I have connections, and I know how things work. At the end of the day, not everything gets said out loud.” He didn’t elaborate, but added, “I want the truth to come out.”

Mahmoud al-Mohamad, Sherine’s husband, was also in contact with Abu Fahd. He had been introduced by a friend who vouched for the broker’s decency. Mahmoud wanted Sherine and the children to join him in Cyprus after a difficult period in their marriage.

“A week before I sent my family, the friend told me, ‘Mahmoud, this man is trustworthy and honest. You can rely on him.’” He paid Abu Fahd $9,000 for the crossing. He insisted on sending Sherine’s father and brother with her. “I brought them specifically because of this concern,” he said. “So they could be with her throughout the trip.”

Everything up until that point had gone “according to plan,” he said. “But right from the start, there was a problem.”

A smuggling outfit is single-use, a one-way trip. Some captains and crew want to stay when they land; others don’t. Those who do sometimes try to blend in among the migrants. More often than not, they are identified, considered as traffickers and arrested, their boats seized as evidence. Some file asylum claims from prison, arguing that they were fleeing conflict themselves, that they were coerced into piloting the boat, or that returning to Lebanon would expose them to inhuman treatment.

The smugglers had purchased the Princess Lulu that day. According to relatives and court documents, the original owner, Khaled al-Qaddour, had refused to sail. Instead, he sold the boat to the traffickers for $15,000 in a deal arranged with Abu Fahd, who accompanied a man named Mahmoud Eid to register the vessel in Eid’s name.

Eid had been working for the Syrian smuggler brothers, Khaled and Firas al-Baytar, for about a year. He first approached them in January 2023 because he needed money to pay for his son’s medical treatment. In exchange for $1,500, he agreed to register a boat in his name to obscure the brothers’ ownership. By December, he needed money again.

Mahmoud, though, added more details to the story.

He said the original captain walked away because the Princess Lulu was damaged -- and because there were illegal drugs hidden on board. “The real issue was that there was something hidden on the boat,” he said. “None of the crew told us. Once the driver discovered it, he refused to depart.”

That was when they brought in another man, Fares Taleb. Mahmoud says Taleb was physically disabled at the time. “They took him from his home,” he said. “Even his wife didn’t know he was going on the trip to Cyprus.”

The big boss in charge of it all, who arranged for the new captain, who authorised the purchase of the boat, is a man nicknamed “al-Hajj.”

boat pics

Princess Lulu

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None of the families we met believed the boat just disappeared. Some still maintain hope that their relatives are alive, held somewhere in Cyprus, Lebanon, or Syria, after being pushed back and detained.

The blame for this cruel uncertainty lies with the smugglers. From the start of the ordeal, they misled and misinformed the families, initially because they didn’t know what had happened, but then to get them to release the cash held by the brokers.

There may have been a genuine mistake at first. Only three boats were scheduled to depart that night. But another boat, carrying 19 people, launched ahead of them. The smugglers scrambled to get the other passengers aboard the other three. The Princess Lulu was the fourth and last to leave, delayed by problems with the boat and crew.

Those 19 people were the second group to land in Cyprus. When the third boat docked, it appeared to smugglers and brokers that their boats had made it. Using the SIM cards they had confiscated, the smugglers texted and called families.

At 11.30 p.m., Sherine’s sister received a message from her WhatsApp account: “In Cyprus/ But they’re still finishing / Some procedures / They’re doing fine,” the messages read. “We’re the ones who put them on board.”

Sherine’s family believes these messages came from her phone, suggesting that she had survived the journey. But she had two SIM cards, Mahmoud said, a Syrian one and a Lebanese-registered one she used for international data. The smugglers took only her Syrian card. That would explain why, when her sister called at 7 p.m. on 12 December, a man picked up and said Sherine was safe.

That same night, a smuggler contacted Mohammad al-Kassem. His brother Kassem, a sweetmaker from Al Quneitra, a razed buffer-zone city in the Golan Heights region of Western Syria, was aboard the boat.

"Thank God for your safety. The young men arrived safely," the voice on the phone told Mohammad.

Mohammad demanded to know, "Why are you calling from my brother's number?" The man replied that Kassem had given him the SIM card before boarding the boat.

After these early exchanges, the passengers’ phones went dark.

Smuggler texting to Amina

The conversation between Amina al-Ali and the smuggler

When it became clear that no one on the Princess Lulu had appeared in the camps, the smugglers began to change tactics, concocting stories to support their claims that the passengers were in Cyprus but unable to talk.

They were being processed, the smugglers said. The British had them detained in the military base. They were in the harbour in Larnaca, with the authorities refusing to release them. One rumour that spread was that the vessel had been intercepted because of the presence of Hezbollah operatives who were planning to carry out attacks on Jewish businesses in Cyprus.

“If 85 individuals were reported to have drowned, at least one body should have washed ashore,” a smuggler told the wife of one of the missing. “However, these persons are imprisoned in Cyprus, but we have no further information about them.”

Diaa said, “The smugglers fabricated many rumours, claiming that they were fine and detained.“ One of the most persistent was that authorities had seized the boat and arrested everyone on board over the presence of three million Captagon pills, a cocktail of synthetic stimulants manufactured in Syria and the regime’s main illicit export. Once the issue was resolved, the passengers would be released.

More macabre and outlandish gossip had them not in Cyprus at all but the victims of a pushback to either Syria, where they disappeared into the notorious Saydnaya Prison, or to Libya, where their organs might have been harvested.

Many families believe that the smugglers planted stories to convince the families to release the payments held by the likes of Abu Saif and Abu Fahd (some said that they returned the money, but other brokers kept it, maintaining the boats had arrived).

Nearly two months after the boat went missing, the sister of a passenger noticed that her brother’s WhatsApp account was “online.” She began frantically sending texts and voicenotes but received only confused replies. When she asked, “Who are you?” The response came in Chinese: "我是西莉亚" — "I am Celsia."

She continued to press for answers, asking “Where is the owner of this phone?” and “Is the owner of the phone okay?” She offered a reward several times. “Send us a picture to confirm that the owner is safe and you will get whatever you want.”

The reply was blunt: “I don’t know you.”

PART TWO: “WE ARE DEALING WITH DEMONS”
MOHAMMAD SABLOUH, HEAD OF THE LEGAL SUPPORT PROGRAMME at the non-profit Cedar Centre for Legal Studies in Tripoli, is a thorn in the side of Lebanese authorities. During his 20-year career as a lawyer, he pursued cases against the government and military over torture and human rights violations, and has been subject to regular harassment by the state. His efforts since joining the Cedar Centre in 2020 have been spent “providing legal support and awareness to migrants.”

We met Sablouh in Tripoli last July and have spoken with him on multiple occasions since. “This is the most complex case I've ever encountered,” he said. “The problem is that I am in contact with the families who ask every hour about their children. I have nothing to tell them.”

He said, “The captain’s family says that the smugglers are reassuring them that in two months, he will be out of jail. What jail? We do not know,” adding, “we are dealing with demons.”

After Alarm Phone alerted him in late December to the disappearance of the Princess Lulu with dozens of people on board, he immediately contacted Lebanon’s Foreign Minister, Abdallah Bou Habib, who “has the capability for rapid diplomatic communication.”

Abdallah Bou Habib “did not respond at all” and “considered these [people] as numbers, not humans. He didn't contact any country.”

Sablouh also sent missives to various government and humanitarian agencies, such as the UNHCR, in Turkey, Cyprus, and Lebanon. He even “sent correspondences to the British Embassy because there was information that they were at the British base in Cyprus.”

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees declared that the passengers were not in Cyprus. The Cypriot ambassador to Lebanon told Sablouh, "I am not like Syria or Lebanon, where we detain people and say they are not here. We have open camps, we welcome people, and if they were here, we would have announced it."

His outreach to the relatives began with a Facebook group, "Missing Boat Families,” asking those affected to provide information. He quickly assembled a list of 75 names, which then grew to 85.

Sablouh filed a legal complaint in Lebanon at the beginning of January on behalf of one of the fathers of the passengers. The goal at that time, he said, was “not to expose the smuggling gang as much as it was to obtain data through the judiciary… to find out where this boat is.”

After ten days, the Lebanon Public Prosecutor's Office referred the case to the Information Branch of the Internal Security Forces. “I told them this [passenger’s telephone] number had internet access. This means we have GPS on the boat. The Information Branch did not take responsibility.” They repeatedly hung up on him.

Prosecutors filed charges against several people, including the al-Baytar brothers, Hekmat al-Arak, and the boat's original owner. But none of them was ever taken into custody. In February, police arrested Mahmoud Eid, who'd acted as a front for the al-Baytars. Still, “none of the gang members was arrested.”

Tired of the slow pace of Lebanese courts, Sablouh took matters into his own hands. He joined forces with a Lebanese journalist to expose Tripoli’s smuggling rings in a two-part documentary. With help from the families, he began gathering names – not just the brokers, but the men behind them, those who planned the routes and packed the boat. The families shared their names with us, which are also included in court documents.

While Abu Fahd, Abu Saif, and others served as go-betweens, the main operators were the Syrian brothers Khaled and Fares al-Baytar. The man known as “al-Hajj,” accused of being the leader of Tripoli’s smuggling network, is Omar Khaled al-Masoumi, a Lebanese national from Tal Maayan in Akkar. He was convicted of smuggling in 2019 and described by Sablouh as the “very dangerous head of human smuggling gangs.”

On 25 June, three days after Sablouh submitted the film to the courts, police arrested al-Masoumi. They announced the arrest on social media. Within hours, he was released.

The arrest prompted new concerns over the safety of Mahmoud Eid. Other inmates threatened him with violence, trying to force him to deny any connection to Omar al-Masoumi. Sablouh sought protective custody for his key witness.

Meanwhile, the attempts to obtain answers through the judiciary about the possible whereabouts of the Princess Lulu went nowhere. Judge Randa Nassar, assigned to oversee the proceedings, “wasn't cooperative.” More than a year later, Sablouh still has not received the GPS data he requested from the military and security services.

Sablouh blames sections of the “security apparatus” for complicity in the smuggling operations in Lebanon and he believes they take a share in the “huge amounts of money taken from the families and migrants.”

“How can four boats leave in one night, and the security does not notice? There are question marks about the security performance. And it became clear over time that Lebanon officially turns a blind eye to illegal migration to pressure European countries.”

The passengers fled Lebanon during a period of intense hostility towards its nearly one million Syrian residents, with anti-refugee rhetoric, forced deportations, and vigilante mobs.

The central motivation is EU money. With the reeling from an economic collapse that began in 2019, the attitude of the Lebanese state has been one of “If you want me to combat illegal migration, give me money,” Sablouh told us. “This was stated by the Minister of Displaced People [Issam Sharafeddine] recently when he threatened to send five thousand migrants across the sea.” Sharafeddine’s successor, Kamal Chehadeh, referred to Syrians as an “existential threat to Lebanon."

The country is “experiencing the worst racist crisis in dealing with Syrian refugees,” Sablouh said. Across the region, there were similar reports of citizens and governments turning against displaced Syrians. In Turkey, the country's three million Syrians were recently subject to a spate of mob violence and attacks from mainstream political parties.

For years, Syrian refugees have been used as political pawns against a European Union that can be easily bribed by the threat of mass expulsions.

On 10 January, 2024, President of Cyprus Nikos Christodoulides met with President of Lebanon Joseph Aoun in Beirut to discuss bilateral cooperation, which would pave the way for a three-year €1 billion financial assistance package that included “combating human trafficking and smuggling, strengthened support to the Lebanese Armed Forces.”

By the time of these high-level talks, stories of dismembered and decomposed bodies washing up on shores had already begun to surface.

THE UNCLAIMED DEAD
“We received news that there are bodies in Turkey. We received news of four bodies in Northern Cyprus,” Sablouh said. Linking the bodies to the passengers offered a fresh hope for answers. But new obstacles quickly arose. The families are spread across various Mediterranean countries: in Lebanon, Syria, Cyprus, and Turkey. So, too, are the corpses. The level of inter-country cooperation necessary to solve the case simply wasn’t there.

Cyprus lawyer Constantinos Tambourlas became involved in the case in February, two months after the Princess Lulu’s disappearance, when some of the relatives in Limassol visited his office. He told us the men still believed authorities were holding their families in the harbour in Larnaca, and preventing their contact with the outside world. Over time, the police’s increasingly blunt dismissals only deepened the sense of conspiracy.

Tambourlas doesn’t believe that the passengers ever made it to Cyprus. “Thousands of Syrians arrive in Cyprus each year, and none of them are held incommunicado,” he said. “This boat has thirty-five children. It is not possible that they are detained and no country in the world has declared it.”.

Instead, he petitioned the government to allow families in Cyprus to provide DNA samples to test against the unidentified bodies. All of the relatives we met there had given swabs. The corpses in Northern Cyprus came back negative, he said, but the government in Turkey would not engage.

”Yeah, it's a political problem,” he said. “Nobody from our team can travel to Turkey to conduct investigations at the governmental level.”

“Unfortunately, the International Committee of the Red Cross does not have a presence in Turkey, and the Red Crescent has no authority,” Sablouh said. “Therefore, any correspondence will be directly through the Turkish judiciary. We have no other solution.”

The investigation into the bodies that washed up in Turkey remains confidential and unsolved. We sent questions and Freedom of Information requests to several departments. All of the requests were rejected.

In Lebanon, the process of obtaining DNA from families also hit logistical and political barriers. The state refused to cover the cost of the tests, which forced the families, many of them poor, to fund it themselves. But no amount of money, however, could overcome the animosity of the Lebanese state toward Syrians. To give their DNA samples, the families would have to travel from the north, from Nabatieh, Beirut, and Mount Lebanon, where much of the refugee population lives.

“If you take them in your car and pass through security checkpoints, they will be arrested and deported,” Sablouh said. “If you take them to the Internal Security Forces' barracks for DNA tests, they will check their records. If their residency is not valid, they will be arrested, referred to General Security, and then deported.” None of the families was able to submit their DNA for testing.

Sablouh told us he believes that the “boat sank before reaching Cyprus,” but doesn’t discount the possibility that the coastguards pushed them back before this happened. Of the testing, he remains hopeful that answers can be found in Interpol’s new I-familia global DNA database, designed to help identify missing persons and “bring closure to cases and allow families to rebuild their lives.”

On 7 February, a funeral was held in Northern Cyprus for the four bodies that had washed ashore in Karpasia.

"THE MOTHER OF CORPSE NUMBER 2"
Two weeks after the boats set sail from Lebanon, two corpses washed up on the beach in Al Hamidiyah, a town within the district of Tartus on the Syrian coast. The Consolidated Rescue Group publicised images of a bracelet with an Arabic inscription of the Ayat al-Kursi that was found on one of the bodies, catching the attention of Hamada’s relatives in Daraa. His uncle and his cousin drove the four hours to investigate that same day.

His mother, Wafaa, wanted to join them on the trip, but ”his uncle didn't let me” because he was afraid of her reaction. “But I'm his mother,” she said. “I can recognise him from his clothes, what he looks like, and what he smells like.” When she did finally visit Tartus, they would not let her view the body.

She agreed to submit a DNA sample. The state then announced that damaged lab equipment would delay the results by up to two years. Hamada’s family was forced to pay for the test at a private facility in Damascus. As they waited for the results, they followed up on rumours that the 12/12 missing were in the town of Roumieh, in northern Lebanon. “We sent people and they asked around, but they didn't find anything,” she said. They returned, however, with claims that the men were being held in Qubba prison, north of Tripoli. But this lead went nowhere, too.

Syria’s Atomic Energy Commission in Damascus came back with the results of the DNA test in March 2024. Wafaa was a match.

“I have been determined as the mother of corpse number two,” she said. “He is the young man who is basically my son, but not my son. God willing, he is not my son.”

Decades of torture, violence, and propaganda by the Assad regime have left the Syrian people traumatised. Many have little trust in their government, even in matters as basic as identifying their own children. “I'm not convinced by the test, not even a quarter of a percent. Why part of me isn't convinced? I don’t know.” She says the tests were “supervised by the government,” and the other corpse was an old man, not her 17-year-old nephew, Nidal. She sees no reason why the cousins would not wash up together.

Wafaa and the family took custody of the body and transported it back to Daraa where they held a funeral. “The body was buried according to Islamic rules,” she said. “I even brought it from Tartus to Daraa in the legal way in the presence of the sheikhs and the police, and everything.”

The family remains in limbo. Her husband remarked that he is “afraid of two things: that the corpse belongs to us and that it doesn’t.”

hamada's bracelet

dna_blur_cnvs

The bracelet, inscribed with the Ayat al-Kursi.

The DNA results in Damascus confirmed that one of the Tartus bodies was Mohammad al-Khasawneh.

﹌
While Hamada’s parents still doubt the outcome of the DNA test, the body and the results give them something – a tragic story to accept or refuse. For other families, there are no answers on offer.

In Beirut last summer, Fatima Hanadi erupted into an uncontrolled despair as she tried to express her grief. At the eight months of uncertainty. At the loss of her son Fouad. At the authorities who did nothing. At the smugglers who told them lies.

Her wish is to “die so he can live.” My veins hurt, she said. “He went to sea so I could rest. He wanted to work to improve our living conditions. My veins hurt right now. When I talk, I feel that they are tearing apart.”

“Fouad, you are the air I breathe. I will die if something happens to Fouad.”

Family and friends held a religious and spiritual consultation to find answers. That night, one participant dreamt that the boat had sunk, throwing the passengers into the sea, and that Fouad had saved them. In the dream, “his hair was longer,” Fatima said, “because it's been seven months.”

The ordeal has left her drained. She cannot eat. She cannot sleep. “I can't continue. I'm tired, tired,” she said. “If they are dead, tell us where they are. I will cry if he is dead. Why did they disappear? Why? What did they do? Why doesn't he answer me? Why, my heart? [...] Every mother wants her son. Like all mothers. Some have had heart attacks; I want my son, I want him now.”

The DNA confirmation and Hamada’s bracelet make a strong case that the Princess Lulu passengers experienced a catastrophic event at sea, drowning with only inflated tyres to protect them. The lack of an immediate search party means the remains were left on the Mediterranean currents. For Hamada, this meant returning to Syria, to Al Hamidiyah, barely 12 kilometres from where he had departed in Cheikh Zennad.

In total, 20 bodies were found in the weeks and months after the Princess Lulu vanished. Nineteen surfaced along the coasts of Syria, Turkey, and Northern Cyprus between late December and early February. In April, the lower half of a woman’s corpse washed ashore in Agia Thekla in Cyprus.

Of the 11 bodies in Antalya and Muğla, two were identified as Turkish nationals and unrelated to the boat. Only Hamada has been identified from the other 19. The rest remain nameless. No one can say for certain where they came from. Unlike many of the families, no one else connected to the case believes the passengers survived. Too much time has passed.

THE LAST WITNESS
THE LAST PERSON TO SEE THE PRINCESS LULU was a man on the last boat that reached Cyprus. He asked that we not give his name. Being Lebanese, he is afraid he might be sent back.

“I saw it, I saw it, I saw it,” he told us. “I saw the fourth boat.” It was early afternoon on 12 December as his boat reached the shipping lane. They were still far from Cyprus, he said, when he “saw the other boat behind us.” It was carrying many more people than theirs.

Suddenly, a large cargo ship passed them, disturbing the water around them. “The waves almost pushed us over,” he said. After his boat regained its stability, he looked back, and the other boat was no longer behind them. “The waves made it disappear.”

That was the last time anyone saw them.

Though he couldn’t pinpoint the exact time, he said it happened in the early afternoon, as the weather began to deteriorate. “We were still kind of far from Cyprus because the weather was bad. We were about to drown as well.”

Hours later, at 5:30 pm, the Cypriot coast guard spotted his boat, seven miles from shore. When he arrived at the port later that night, the other two boats “were already there.” Once on land, they were all swept up in the chaos of the arrival procedures. The Princess Lulu never joined them.

Using the time and location of his rescue, we calculated the approximate area where he said the cargo ship passed them. It fell within a shipping corridor frequented by huge transport vessels. But there was another danger. Radar data shows that a storm was closing in on the migrant boats. When it hit, it engulfed the area for the next 24 hours. The data also shows the winds and waves pushing northeast, in a direction that could explain why some bodies were found as far away as Syria and Turkey.

This theory was also presented by the Antalya governorate the day after the body washed ashore at the Lykia World Antalya hotel in January. They released a statement saying that meteorological records “determined that the prevailing wind came from the South and the wave from the Southeast, and it is evaluated that the dead bodies in question may be dragged to the coastlines of our province due to the current, wind and waves as a result of the possible sinking of the boat.”

The Syrian regime fell on 8 December 2024, almost a year to the day the Princess Lulu left Lebanon. The collapse appeared to signal a shift in efforts to determine the fate of the passengers. Sablouh said that a Syrian foreign official told him “that the government would take the matter seriously.”

Last month, Wafaa said she and other families in Syria held a meeting with the new government at which officials in the foreign ministry asked them all to file “a collective complaint” in Syrian courts.“It means we go and file a complaint in Syria,” she said – a “class-action lawsuit.”

Two months ago, Cyprus’s Defence Minister, Vasilis Palmas, told a parliamentary committee the government would not investigate allegations that the coast guard was carrying out pushbacks. The remarks came after a migrant boat carrying 20 people capsized off Cyprus, having set out from Tripoli. Seven bodies were recovered, and 11 remain missing. The two sole survivors accused the Coast Guard of firing shots in an attempt to push them back. Last year, the ECHR ruled in favour of two Syrian refugees who had been denied their legal rights and forcibly returned to Lebanon.

We contacted the Attorney General’s office in Cyprus about whether they have, or would, open an official investigation. We got no reply. A week ago, Alarm Phone reported two refugee boats that were “forced back to Syria by the Cypriot authorities,” as part of a new “bilateral search and rescue agreement” policy between the two countries.

Three weeks ago, a court in Lebanon dismissed all felony charges against the smugglers, including al-Masoumi, charges that, if proven, could have resulted in life sentences or even the death penalty. The judge referred the case back to prosecutors, with instructions to reduce any potential crimes to misdemeanours, which carry jail time ranging from a few months to up to three years.

While the judge accepted that the boat had likely sunk and those aboard had perished, in their reasoning, they said the smugglers lacked criminal intent or purpose, “since the sinking of any ship during travel at sea can occur whether this happened during a legal voyage or an illegal voyage.” It made no mention of the unsafe overcrowding or the lack of proper life-saving equipment.

Omar al-Masoumi was ordered to hand over 500 million Lebanese pounds, with 450 million designated as a financial guarantee to keep him from fleeing. This amounts to around €5000, which would get you one and a half seats on the Princess Lulu.

The latest figures from the Missing Migrants Project show that at least 3,129 migrants died in the Mediterranean in 2023 – the highest number since 2016. Over the past decade, more than 29,000 lives have been lost. For the families of those who boarded the Princess Lulu, who have endured more than a year and a half of uncertainty, the fear is that their loved ones will one day be counted among them. And that they will not.

Credits
Edited by Himanshu Ojha

Radar graphic from Ventusky

Maps from Datawrapper

During the course of our year-long investigation, we spoke with dozens of family members who shared their pain, grief, and frustration at the uncertainty surrounding their missing loved ones. Their bravery and generosity in providing information and documents were instrumental in helping us understand this story. For reasons of clarity and space, we were unable to tell all of their personal stories here, but theirs are no less meaningful or important than the ones we have highlighted.