Seventy-eight people drowned on Wednesday in the sinking of a boat carrying “hundreds” of migrants in southwestern Greece, one of the worst disasters of its kind in this country. The fishing boat the victims were on board capsized in international waters off Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula, the coast guard said. A massive rescue operation that began Wednesday morning rescued a total of 104 people, they added. Four of them were hospitalized in Kalamata, a town in the southern Peloponnese.
There could have been “hundreds” of migrants on the boat, a source at the Ministry of Migration told Agence France-Presse. Greek television channels showed the images of survivors, gray blankets over their shoulders and hygienic masks over their faces, getting off a yacht bearing the inscription Georgetown, the capital of the Cayman Islands. Others were evacuated on stretchers.
They were taken to the port of Kalamata by this ship which rescued them. The President of the Republic, Katerina Sakellaropoulou, was to go there. No information has yet been given on the nationality, sex and age of these people.
Greece has seen many shipwrecks of migrant boats, often dilapidated and overloaded, but it is so far the heaviest human toll since a previous one on June 3, 2016 during which at least 320 people died or disappeared. . Last November, two shipwrecks on the same day in the Aegean Sea left at least 21 people dead and many missing.
The Coast Guard said that at the time of the tragedy from Tuesday to Wednesday night, 47 nautical miles from Pylos in the Ionian Sea, none of the people on board the fishing boat were equipped with a life jacket. . The boat had been spotted on Tuesday afternoon by a plane from Frontex, the European Border Surveillance Agency, but the migrants on board “refused any help”, said in a previous press release the Greek port authorities.
In addition to the port police patrol boats, a frigate from the Greek navy, an airplane and a helicopter from the air force as well as six boats which sailed in the area took part in this rescue operation. According to the first information from the authorities, the shipwrecked boat had sailed from Libya to Italy. At the external borders of the European Union in the Mediterranean, Greece is a common passage for many of those seeking to migrate to the European Union from neighboring Turkey.
Many shipwrecks, often deadly, take place in the Aegean Sea while Greece is regularly accused by NGOs and the media of turning back migrants seeking asylum in the EU. Besides this route, these people also try to pass directly to Italy by crossing the Mediterranean south of the Peloponnese or the island of Crete.
Since the start of the year, 44 people have drowned in the eastern Mediterranean, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM). Last year, the number of people killed in this way was 372. On Wednesday, a struggling sailboat with 80 migrants on board sailing off Crete was also rescued and towed by coast guard patrol boats to Kaloi Limenes in the south of this island, according to the Greek port police.
In the electoral campaign for the legislative elections of June 25, the former conservative Prime Minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, has decided to cancel an electoral rally scheduled for the end of the day in Patras, the large port of this region of Peloponnese, announced his New Democracy (ND) party. This politician, who during his four years at the head of the government led a very tough policy on migration, also spoke on the phone with the interim Prime Minister, Ioannis Sarmas.