They will give everything that they have and risk their lives.” “These people have no future and often the only option they have is to leave. “We shall be seeing a lot more of these ships,” Corabatir said. In Turkey alone, more than 1 million Syrians are fending for themselves without jobs or basic services - many of them doctors or lawyers who can afford to pay thousands of dollars for a cargo ship berth, said Metin Corabatir, who heads the Ankara-based Research Center on Asylum and Migration.
The cargo ship method is not likely to go away any time soon because of high demand.
Frontex spokeswoman Izabella Cooper said one vessel that arrived in Italy recently appeared to have been bought online from a scrapyard. The EU border agency Frontex says about 15 cargo ships smuggling asylum-seekers have tried to reach Europe since August. A crisis in merchant shipping has left a glut of cargo ships on the market, with low demand depressing prices and making an aging vessel particularly affordable to criminal gangs, said a Greek merchant marine ministry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on the record. Buying a cargo ship is a lot easier and cheaper than it used to be.
