AFGHAN refugees picked up by the Turkish coastguard have accused Greek authorities of herding them onto life rafts and abandoning them at sea.

A patrol boat carrying Associated Press journalists picked up 37 people, including 18 children, from two life rafts in the Aegean sea on September 12. 

Refugee Omid Hussain Nabizada said that Greek authorities had “taken our phones and said a bus will come and take you to the camp. But they took us and put us on a ship. They left us in the water in a very bad way.”

A New York Times investigation last month found that Greece had sailed “at least 1,072” refugees to the edge of its territorial waters on life rafts – which have no means of propulsion or steering – and abandoned them. Such “pushbacks” are against international law.

Greece countered by accusing Turkish patrol boats of accompanying refugees on life rafts and seeking to push them into Greek waters.

Greek coastguard spokesman Lieutenant-Colonel Nikolaos Kokkalas said that patrols regularly detect dinghies trying to enter Greece “illegally” and that “among them there are also inflatable life rafts such as those described,” implying that the refugees’ testimony that they were put to sea from Greece was not trustworthy.

Greece also said that the alleged Turkish behaviour violates an EU-Turkish accord from 2016, under which Ankara agreed to take refugees turned back from the EU’s borders and to stem refugee flows.

Turkey has repeatedly threatened to ditch the agreement, which was itself widely condemned as illegal, on the grounds that the EU did not meet terms such as fast-tracking Turkish visa applications, and over recent confrontations over the war in Libya and disputed mineral resources in the Mediterranean.