Salamina: 60-year-old found dead inside a sailing boat at Selinia

The body of a 60-year-old man, a Turkish national, was found inside a sailing boat flying a Turkish flag that was anchored in the area of Agios Nikolaos, at Selinia on Salamina. According to reports from the news outlets that covered the incident, the discovery was made at midday on Tuesday 18 August, while the case became more widely known on Wednesday 19 August. The Salamina Port Authority was initially informed by the Hellenic Police, and Coast Guard officers, an ambulance crew and a coroner went to the scene. It has not become known who first realised what had happened inside the boat, nor how long the sailing boat had been anchored at that particular spot.

The body was taken to the morgue in Piraeus, where a post-mortem examination will be carried out. That examination is the only procedure that can determine with certainty the causes and time of death, and its findings usually take days or even weeks when supplementary toxicological and histological tests are ordered. Until it is completed, every assessment of the circumstances of the death remains open. The preliminary inquiry is being conducted by the Γ΄ Port Department of Salamina, which comes under the Piraeus Central Port Authority, and its material will be forwarded to the competent prosecuting authority together with the findings of the forensic examination.

The Coast Guard’s jurisdiction in such incidents follows from the place where they occur: whatever happens on board a vessel or within the port zone is investigated by the port authorities and not by the police, even when the first alert arrives through another service. Selinia, on the southern side of Salamina, serves during the summer months as an anchorage for pleasure craft, sailing boats and small commercial vessels, with increased traffic from boats passing through that make an intermediate stop before continuing towards the Saronic Gulf or the ports of Attica. Its proximity to Piraeus means that the procedures that follow such a discovery, from the transfer of the body to the investigation, are served by services based there.

For the local community, the incident highlights a practical aspect of the summer season: at anchorages where boats remain with crews or individual occupants on board, how quickly an incident is noticed often depends on neighbours at the marina or on someone happening to pass by. It has not been announced whether other people were on board the sailing boat, nor when it had put in to the area. The man’s identifying details are not being made public, as is provided for in incidents of this type, while there has been no announcement about the next procedural steps concerning a foreign national, nor about when the case file is expected to be completed. The next step is the findings of the forensic examination, while the port authorities have not announced a timetable for the completion of the preliminary inquiry.