We re-launch Luca Casarini's article, published by L'Unità, on the shipwreck off the Greek coast yesterday

A massacre among the worst in the Mediterranean, the one that took place yesterday 47 miles off the coast of Greece.

Hundreds of missing people, perhaps more than 500, who unfortunately we know may soon be declared dead. Children, pregnant women, men tried by slavery and detention in Libya. All down at the bottom of the sea, having hoped to the last that someone would help them.

The HCG (Hellas Coast Guard), in a communiqué reminiscent of those in the aftermath of Cutro, throws the cross at the victims. 'They refused help'.

But in the meantime, the first concrete and irrefutable thing to come out of that communiqué is that the Coast Guard, despite having two ports 40 miles away equipped with rescue vessels, did not go out. They moved ships, patrol boats and helicopters only after the shipwreck had occurred, as if it was more a question of building an alibi than saving people.

Hours of unheard pleas for help, a hit-and-run, and an attempted massacre. They knew everything from the afternoon of 13 June. Even the Italian MRCC urged the Greek coastguards to intervene. Frontex knew it, which signalled with the usual triangulation between the operations control centre in Warsaw and the Greek Coordination Centre. Malta knew it, although this is totally irrelevant, given the complete disengagement of the island-state authorities to deal with such things. Everyone knew it, informed immediately by human rights activist Nawal Soufi and the civil rescue Alarm Phone.

There are traces of their appeals and requests for immediate action to all authorities, especially the Greek ones, in emails and also in public appeals via social media. On Nawal's Facebook profile, one can follow the entire chronology of an announced tragedy that becomes a massacre when nothing is done to try to avoid it, prevent it or at least reduce its deadly consequences.

If equipped vessels, not fishing boats or merchant ships passing through, had gone out, had travelled those two hours of navigation to be there, close to that boat overloaded with people asking for help, we would not be counting the dead by now.

But even when dead, they are neither shipwrecked nor people. 'Migrants in transit' are classified in official documents. Many of them will be without a name, without a body. They will not even have a number, as happened at Cutro for the corpses that the sea returned to shore, one by one, for days. Fifty miles from the coast, in one of the deepest parts of the Aegean, is too much for this to happen. The 'migrants in transit', they are second-class shipwrecks, those who can be 'not rescued'. They are human beings consigned by European states, to the 'probability' of death.

Alarm Phone claims to have alerted the Greek authorities, together with Frontex and UNHCR Greece, since shortly after 2pm the day before yesterday. Until midnight, when the boat capsized, the calls for action were continuous, incessant. The rescue telephone also tried to get two merchant ships, which were cruising nearby, the 'Lucky Sailor' and the 'Faitthful Warrior', to intervene. But the former, the only one with whom it was possible to speak, reiterated that it could intervene 'only by order of the Greek authorities'. From aboard the barge, the voice of those calling for help from the satellite became fainter and fainter. It spoke of six people already dead, or in any case unconscious. Of many women and children, terrified.

"Will there be among the survivors that man who called?" wonders Nawal. "What words should I use now to answer the family members of the dead who call me for news?" she continues on her Facebook profile. "I have spent a lifetime carrying out this mission and have never learned the right words to say to a mother who loses a child. Their voices are etched in my mind... Dozens and dozens of calls, cries, screams...".

You don't need honour pickets to feel that these days are days of mourning.