At least 78 people died when a migrant boat with hundreds of people on board sank early Wednesday morning off the coast of Greece, the country’s Coast Guard said. More deaths are feared.
Since then, 104 people who were on the boat have been pulled from the water and taken to the city of Kalamata.
“All of the men who have been rescued are between 16 and 41 years old, according to what they said,” Kalamata Mayor Thanasis Vasilopoulos said Wednesday. “They also said there were women and children on board,” he said.
The coast guard changed the number of people who have died from 79 to 74. They also said that the search and rescue operation will stop when it gets dark in the area and will start again when it gets light again tomorrow.
No one knows for sure how many people were on the ship when it sank. Surviving people say that there may have been as many as 750 people on the plane.
The tweet below verifies the news:
At least 78 people drown after migrant boat sinks off Greek coasthttps://t.co/V1C6KBibMi
— Jenet Harris (@dcmj122) June 15, 2023
A spokesman for Peloponnese prefect Panagiotis Nikas said, “We fear that the number of dead will go up by a lot.”
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) had said earlier on Twitter that it thought “up to 400 people” were on board.
In a tweet, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called the shipwreck “horrific” and said, “As I’ve said before, every person looking for a better life deserves safety and dignity.”
State broadcaster ERT said that officials had told them that the boat had left from Tobruk, which is in Libya.
The NGO Alarm Phone said it first got a call from the boat on Tuesday afternoon. It was “difficult to communicate with the distressed,” who said they couldn’t make it through the night.
The alarm Phone heard from people on board that the captain left the ship three hours after the first call for help and that people needed food and drink.
Around 8 p.m. local time on Tuesday, a commercial ship is said to have given the boat water.
The last time the boat could be reached by Alarm Phone was just before 1 a.m. Wednesday local time. The Alarm Phone said that all you could hear was “Hello, my friend… The call ended before he could finish.
The Coast Guard is doing search and rescue work 47 nautical miles off the coast of Pylos in the southwestern Peloponnese, in international waters.
Greek police say that the boat was headed to Italy.
On Wednesday, Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou went to see some of the survivors. “We are shocked, just like everyone else in Greece,” said Vasilopoulus.
Greece has been at the center of the European migrant problem because it has been a way for people from the Middle East, Asia, and Africa to get into the European Union.
This year, the number of undocumented people coming to Europe by sea has gone through the roof because of war, injustice, and the climate crisis.
The UN’s refugee agency (UNHCR) says that from January to March of this year, more than 36,000 people came to the Mediterranean region of Europe. This is almost twice as many as during the same time period in 2022.
Click on the following links for more news from the California Examiner:
- Firefighter’s Life Cut Short as He Drowns Saving Daughter’s Life at Sea
- Heartbreaking News: Boulder Mother Faces Charges for Baby’s Murder
It’s the most since the peak of the refugee crisis in 2015 and early 2016, when more than a million people came to Europe during some of the worst fighting in Syria’s civil war. At that time, EU unity broke down into fighting and chaos at the borders as a result.