‘Hitting the right nail’: Refugee rescue group defiant as Greece targets it

To Greek authorities, he is the nefarious Norwegian mastermind of an international criminal organisation “operationally structured to commit repeated crimes”, which he secretly controls from his hometown of Tromso, north of the Arctic Circle.To thousands of distressed asylum seekers on the Aegean, he is a hero who may have saved their lives by publicly alerting search and rescue authorities who might rather not have known of their whereabouts.A Greek court will open trial proceedings on Tuesday against Tommy Olsen to decide who is right.Olsen is the creator of Aegean Boat Report, an independent monitor of distressed vessels in the Aegean. When contacted, he alerts the Greek or Turkish asylum service and coastguard, depending on whose jurisdiction the refugees find themselves in.The public prosecutor on the island of Kos, in the east Aegean, has accused Olsen of conspiring to smuggle refugees into Greece and to conceal them from authorities.Olsen won’t be at the Kos court because Norwegian authorities thought the evidence against him too flimsy to grant extradition.“They looked at what the Greek authorities described I had done, and they said, ‘There’s nothing illegal here. It’s act...