Greece yesterday pursued a grim search for survivors a day after a fishing boat overloaded with migrants capsized and sank in the Ionian Sea, with the number of victims feared to reach into the hundreds.
As relatives in the migrants’ home countries frantically sought news of their loved ones, the coast guard said 78 bodies had been recovered so far, amending a toll of 79 deaths given on Wednesday.
“This could be the worst maritime tragedy in Greece in recent years,” UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Representative in Greece Stella Nanou told state broadcaster ERT.
Photo: Reuters
“It’s really horrific,” UNHCR staffer Erasmia Roumana told reporters at the port of Kalamata, adding that the survivors were “in a very bad psychological situation.”
“Many are under shock, they are so overwhelmed,” she said. “Many of them worry about the people they traveled with, families or friends. They want to call their families and tell them that they arrived.”
A spokeswoman told reporters that two patrol boats, a helicopter and six other ships in the area were searching the waters west of the Peloponnese Peninsula, one of the deepest areas in the Mediterranean.
Greece has declared three days of mourning over the tragedy.
“One young man started to cry and said: ‘I need my mother...’ This voice is inside my ears. And will always be inside,” Red Cross nurse Ekaterini Tsata told reporters.
About 30 people were hospitalized with pneumonia and exhaustion, but are not in immediate danger, officials said.
The coast guard took half of the victims to Kalamata on Wednesday, and a Greek navy frigate would take the remaining bodies yesterday, the agency said.
So far 104 people have been rescued, but there are fears that hundreds more are missing, based on testimony from the survivors, and that no women and children were among them.
Greek government spokesman Ilias Siakantaris on Wednesday said there were unconfirmed reports that up to 750 people were on the boat.
“We do not know what was in the hold ... but we know that several smugglers lock people up to maintain control,” he told ERT.
A survivor told doctors in Kalamata that he had seen 100 children in the boat’s hold, ERT said.
“The fishing boat was 25-30m long. Its deck was full of people, and we assume the interior was just as full,” coast guard spokesman Nikolaos Alexiou told ERT.
The coast guard said a surveillance plane with Europe’s Frontex agency had spotted the boat on Tuesday afternoon, but the passengers had “refused any help.”
The boat’s engine gave up shortly before 11pm on Tuesday and the vessel capsized in the deepest waters of the Mediterranean Sea, Siakantaris said, sinking in about 10 to 15 minutes.
It added that none on board were wearing life jackets.
Authorities said it appeared the migrants had departed from Libya and were heading for Italy.
The survivors are mainly from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan, the coast guard said, and are temporarily housed in a port warehouse to be identified and interviewed by Greek authorities, who are looking for possible smugglers among them.
Eight people are being questioned in connection with the accident.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver