Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? BBC Two, review: emotional if never wholly conclusive

The Mediterranean is a cemetery for migrants who attempt the perilous crossing from North Africa to Europe. Stories appear in the press with depressing regularity, but Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? (BBC Two) focused on a tragedy that stood out for sheer weight of numbers.

The Adriana was a rusty fishing trawler which capsized off the coast of Greece last summer. Patently unseaworthy, it was packed with 750 migrants. The people-smugglers threw the passengers’ supplies overboard in order to fit more bodies on board. After a “rescue effort” by the Greek authorities – or a botched attempt to tow it into Turkish waters; survivors have claimed the vessel keeled over, after which they saw crew members gazing down at them in the water but made no move to pull them out – 600 people drowned.

You may be thinking: it’s a risk these people willingly took. You may not care what happened to them. You may think that stories like this act as a deterrent, and that the Greeks are perfectly within their rights to get tough (although they reject all accusations of illegal activity). But if there is a cover-up – if a government is lying about its activities, as is alleged here – then it should be exposed.

The most comprehensive reporting here was done by a New York Times journalist, Matina Stevis-Gridneff, who meticulously chronicled the route of the Adriana and alleged the Greeks decided to send a boatload of masked special forces operatives, rather than a rescue vessel, to intercept it.

Months before this, another journalist, Fayad Mulla, had taken covert footage on the island of Lesbos of migrants – including a baby and young children – being unloaded from the back of a van by masked men and put on a Greek coastguard vessel. According to the documentary, those same migrants were later picked up by the Turkish coastguard, drifting in a tiny inflatable, although we saw no firm evidence that they were the same people.

The aim of award-winning filmmaker Ben Steele was to establish a pattern of behaviour. “What they’re doing to people is so specific, so coordinated and so repetitive across geography and time that it can only be policy,” Stevis-Gridneff said. But Steele didn’t quite nail this. While the evidence was powerful, it was difficult to know how widespread these alleged practices are. Steele’s own interviewing of those in power was weak, and the most damning moment came in an off-camera admission by an interviewee who had forgotten that his mic was still recording.

On an emotional level, however, it struck home, whether in the sorrowful testimonies of two men who survived the Adriana sinking, or the words of the British founder of a search-and-rescue operation who simply could not understand how anybody in his line of work could willingly send people in need of help back out to sea.

Dead Calm: Killing in the Med? is on BBC Two on Monday 17 June at 9pm, and available on BBC iPlayer now