Global Courant
Athens, Greece –
The Greek coastguard has begun the last day of searching an area of the Mediterranean where a large fishing boat full of migrants has sunk and hundreds of passengers are missing and feared dead.
The 24-hour search and rescue operation off the coast of southern Greece has entered its third day with little hope of finding survivors or bodies, as none have been located since Wednesday, when 78 bodies were recovered and 104 people rescued.
The fishing boat carrying the migrants was on its way from Libya to Italy. Greek authorities and the European Union border control agency Frontex tracked the boat before it capsized and sank early Wednesday.
According to the International Organization for Migration, the UN migration agency, the trawler may have carried as many as 750 passengers.
Most of the survivors were moved on Friday from a storage shed in the southern port of Kalamata, where family members also gathered to search for loved ones, to migrant shelters near Athens.
Nine people – all males from Egypt, ranging in age from 20 to 40 – were arrested and detained on charges of human trafficking and participation in a criminal enterprise. Twenty-seven of the survivors remain in hospital, health officials said.
Coastal watchman Nikos Alexiou, citing survivors’ accounts, said the passengers in the hold of the fishing boat included women and children, but the number of missing, believed to be in the hundreds, remained unclear.
Officials at a state-run morgue outside Athens photographed the victims’ faces and collected DNA samples to begin the identification process.
