Documentary Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? alleges the Greek coastguard is kidnapping migrants and forcing them back to sea

He’s there to find proof that the stories he’s been hearing are true. At the strange, sad juncture our world finds itself right now, if something is not recorded on video, many people will refuse to believe it ever happened.

Fayed doesn’t have to wait long. A speedboat arrives at the jetty. On board are men dressed all in black and wearing balaclavas. Then a white van arrives. More masked men in black, this time unloading a group of migrants, including two babies.

The refugees are herded onto the speedboat, which then heads to a larger vessel waiting nearby. The van, having delivered its “cargo”, drives away.

The masked men in black could be smugglers, people traffickers. But they’re not; they’re Greek special forces members and the vessel they deliver the migrants to belongs to the Hellenic Coast Guard (HCG).

What Fayed has just recorded is a state-sponsored kidnapping of the kind he and others have been told happens all the time in Greece. “Proof that you cannot deny anymore,” he says. “The smoking gun.”

But the Greek authorities, and most vocally the country’s Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis, continue to deny that the HCG and special forces soldiers are intercepting and abducting refugees, deliberately refusing to rescue those the smugglers cast adrift in overcrowded dinghies, or — most shockingly of all — throwing some of them into the water to drown.

The HCG’s high-tech vessel the 920 is festooned with cameras offering a view from all sides. Strangely, not a single one of them was working on June 14, 2023, when the 920 drew up alongside the Adriana, a rickety old boat that was no longer seaworthy.

The boat was built to carry 400 people. That night it was carrying approximately 700 migrants, some of them children, and listing badly, even though the water in that part of the Mediterranean was calm. Dead calm.

The migrants, mostly from Pakistan, but also from Syria, Palestine, Egypt and Afghanistan, had been at sea for almost a week. They’d run out of food and fresh water days earlier. The smugglers had thrown the meagre supplies the migrants had brought along with them overboard, in order to squeeze as many people as possible into the boat.

They were so desperate, they considered drinking the boat’s engine cooling fluid. They decided drinking urine would be safer.

Because the cameras on the 920 — which arrived on the scene two full hours after learning that the Adriana was in serious trouble — weren’t turned on, there is no video evidence to prove or disprove allegations that the HCG vessel towed the Adriana too fast, causing it to capsize.

Eighty-two bodies were recovered from the water, although the total number presumed dead is around 600.

But there’s another kind of evidence: the testimonies of the 109 migrants who survived

But there’s another kind of evidence: the testimonies of the 109 migrants who survived. Two of them, Mohamed and Abdelrahman, appear in the film. Their words will haunt you.

Recalling the sight that greeted him when his head bobbed above the water, Abdelrahman says: “The dead were floating in a row. Everybody had horror on their face.”

The face of Jonas Grimheden, of the EU border agency Frontex, expresses nothing when he’s interviewed by Ben Steele.

He doesn’t believe that Greece is hunting down, abducting and sometimes killing migrants, even though the BBC’s investigations have uncovered allegations the HCG is linked to the deaths of 43 migrants between 2020 and 2023, including nine people who were thrown into the sea. The only time Grimheden shows any emotion is when he becomes irritated by Steele’s use of the word “killing” and storms off.

Dimitris Baltakos, an ex-special forces soldier Steele talks to, is equally dismissive of the allegations, even as he’s viewing Fayed Mulla’s incriminating video.

But when Steele is out of the room and Baltakos thinks the camera is turned off, he and a friend, who’s out of shot, laugh about how “stupid” it was to abduct the migrants “in broad daylight”. Sickening.