Share

Greek Coast Guard Rescues Migrants From Capsized Boat

Spokesman Al Khamis Al Bosaifi said about three-quarters of the migrants were women and there were at least five children.

Advertisement

“The number of people in distress could be counted in the hundreds”, a spokeswoman for the coastguard said. The exhibit runs through October 3.

Amnesty International says a Syrian refugee whose asylum application in Greece was rejected has been detained on the island of Lesbos pending deportation to Turkey.

Migrant smugglers have opted for more risky routes after the European Union signed at £4.7billion agreement with Turkey in March for it to take back all those arriving on the Greek islands.

Four bodies were recovered in the Mediterranean south of the island after a fishing boat capsized, and around 100 more are feared dead.

More than 300 migrants and refugees were rescued early Friday after their boat capsized in the Mediterranean Sea, “Armenpress” reports, citing NBC, officials said.

The other 97 survivors of the shipwreck and the bodies of 9 other victims are being taken back to Egypt by Egyptian ships.

The bodies of 117 people were recovered from a beach near Zwara, Libya, by Libyan Red Crescent volunteers, Stephen Ryan, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told CNN. All but a few were from African countries.

While a migrant boat had capsized off Libya on Wednesday, strong winds and currents could have carried the bodies across great distances, making it hard to determine for sure where they came from.

More than 2,500 people have died trying to make the perilous journey this year – the vast majority of them on crossings between Libya and Italy.

Others are thought to be missing from the boat which was found in global waters, 75 nautical miles (140km) south of Greece’s Crete island.

The Greek coast guard told CNN that the number of migrants on board was likely less than the estimate from the immigration organization.

It remained unclear whether other people were missing in the sinking.

Al-Khamis Al-Bosaifi said most of the migrants appeared to be from sub-Saharan Africa, though their bodies were decomposed and it was not clear when they had drowned.

Italy says arrivals so far in 2016 are down two percent on past year at about 40,000 landings, mostly of people from African countries like Nigeria, Eritrea, Gambia and Somalia. The Libyan navy said meanwhile it had found the bodies of at least 104 migrants on the shore in the western Libyan town of Zwara, warning that the toll could rise.

Advertisement

‘This is a cross-border network of smugglers and traffickers, and there is a need for an global effort to combat this phenomenon.’ Libyan coastguards found an empty boat drifting on Thursday, according to Libyan navy colonel Ayoub Gassim.

Refugees and migrants wait by a police car in Crete after being rescued from another capsized vessel on May 31