Four people died on Monday August 28 in the sinking of a migrant boat off Lesbos, an island in the Aegean Sea. Eighteen other people are believed to have survived, the Greek coastguard said, after rescuing the stricken boat. One of the patrol boats “spotted and rescued twenty-two foreigners off the island of Lesvos, four of whom” were dead, port police said in a brief statement.
“They were all transferred to the port of Mytilene”, the capital of Lesbos, a usual passage for migrants from the western coasts close to Turkey, adds the document. No details, neither on the conditions of the sinking nor on the identity of the people, have been published for the moment by the authorities.
The Greek port police, with the help of the European border surveillance agency, Frontex, regularly patrols the maritime zone in the eastern Aegean, opposite Turkey, from where many migrants try to to pass through Greece, often bound for Western Europe.
Despite numerous rescue operations, by the Greek authorities, of boats in difficulty, numerous shipwrecks have taken place in this area, often causing victims.
The Greek authorities are often accused by the media and human rights NGOs of having carried out illegal pushbacks of migrants to Turkish waters in order to limit the number of arrivals on Greek soil.
