Global Courant
At least 59 people have died and dozens are missing off the coast of southern Greece after a fishing boat carrying migrants capsized and sank, authorities said on Wednesday.
A major search and rescue operation was launched in the area. Authorities said 104 people have so far been rescued after the overnight incident some 75 kilometers southwest of Greece’s southern Peloponnese region.
Four of the survivors were hospitalized with symptoms of hypothermia. It was unclear how many passengers would remain missing at sea after the 59 bodies were recovered, the Greek coastguard said.
Six Coast Guard vessels, a Navy frigate, a military transport aircraft, an Air Force helicopter, several private vessels and a drone belonging to the European Union’s border control agency, Frontex, took part in the ongoing search.
Migrants arrive at the port of Kalamata after Wednesday’s rescue operation. (Eurokinisi/Reuters)
The boat bound for Italy is said to have departed from the Tobruk area in eastern Libya. The Italian coastguard first warned the Greek authorities and Frontex about the approaching ship on Tuesday.
In the southern port of Kalamata, dozens of rescued migrants were taken to shelters set up by ambulance services and the United Nations Refugee Agency to receive dry clothes and medical attention.
Libyan authorities launched a large-scale crackdown on migrants in eastern Libya earlier this month. Activists have said several thousand migrants, including Egyptians, Syrians, Sudanese and Pakistanis, have been detained. Libyan authorities deported many Egyptians to their homeland through a land crossing point.
In western Libya, authorities have raided migrant centers in the capital Tripoli and other cities in recent weeks. At least 1,800 migrants were detained and transferred to government-run detention centers, according to the UN refugee agency.
Mediterranean smugglers are increasingly taking larger boats into international waters off mainland Greece to evade local coast guard patrols.
Fatalities at levels not seen in 6 years
On Sunday, 90 migrants on a US-flagged yacht were rescued in the area after making a distress call.
Separately on Wednesday, a yacht carrying 81 migrants was towed to a port on the southern coast of the Greek island of Crete after authorities received a distress call.
The latest incident comes as the UN migration office reported on Tuesday that 2022 was the deadliest for Middle East and North African migrants trying to reach Europe since 2017.
According to data released by the International Organization for Migration’s Missing Migrants Project, about 3,800 people died on sea and land migration routes in and from the Middle East and North Africa. That’s an 11 percent increase from 2021 and the highest since 2017, when the project documented the deaths of 4,255 people in the region.
The first three months of 2023 were the deadliest first quarter since 2017, the same agency reports, with 441 documented migrant deaths.
“The situation in the Mediterranean has been a humanitarian crisis for more than a decade,” IOM spokesman Safa Msehli said in April. “And the fact that the deaths are continuing on their own is very alarming, but the fact that that has increased is extremely alarming because it means very little concrete action has been taken to address the problem.”
