‘Scared is too small a word to describe my emotions’

Fadi Sujaa speaks English fluently, but the words dry up in his throat as he tries to describe his emotions as he crouched below deck on his voyage across the Mediterranean. “‘Scared’ is too small a word,” he says as he looks down at the floor. For one day and one night, Mr Sujaa and 19 other asylum seekers shared a dark, suffocating space just one metre high on a fishing boat that departed from Libya. “There was a strong smell of diesel and no water or fresh air. We could not see anything and we could not stand up,” says the 29-year-old Syrian. Mr Sujaa recounted his experience to The Sunday Times of Malta on World Refugee Day, which is celebrated annually on June 20. In the dead of night and the middle of the sea, Mr Sujaa describes how they were moved onto a bigger boat, which he is convinced was Maltese owned. They were again ushered below deck among the diesel tanks and continued on their way to Europe. Mr Sujaa paid €3,500 to be smuggled across the Mediterranean. He says he had no choice. The qualified medical technologist left his home province of Alswaydaa in May 2012 with the uprising against President Bashar al-Assad showing no signs of abating. If he stayed he faced...