Athens, Jun. 15, (dpa/GNA) – The number of migrants who died after their boat capsized on Wednesday off the south-western coast of Greece is set to surpass the official number of 78 given so far, authorities say.
Media reported about 500 to 700 passengers on board the boat, of which rescue crews have so far been able to save 104 passengers alive, while 78 dead bodies were recovered.
The search for survivors is supposed to continue into the night.
Authorities showed pictures of the completely overcrowded boat only hours before it sank, with up to 200 people crowding the deck of the rusty fishing boat.
According to media reports, the 104 rescued people were all men, while the remaining passengers, among them pregnant women and children according to the survivors, are said to have been below deck and had no chance to escape when the boat sank quickly.
“People were crammed together on the deck of the ship, we suspect the same for the interior,” a coast guard spokesman told the state broadcaster ERT on Wednesday afternoon.
Greek President Katerina Sakellaropoulou flew to the Peloponnese peninsula on Wednesday to assess the situation. “We will probably never know how many people were really on board,” she said.
The vessel was a 30 metre long fishing boat that, according to the survivors, set sail from Tobruk in Libya and had been en route to Italy.
Italian authorities notified their Greek counterparts on Tuesday to report that a fishing boat full of people had entered the Greek search and rescue area, according to a statement by the coastguard.
Both the Greek coastguard and nearby freighters had repeatedly offered to help the passengers by radio, but their offers were initially refused with the passengers indicating their destination was Italy.
The reason for the tragedy remains unclear, but the Greek coastuard suspects a panic onboard the overcrowded boat may have been the cause of the capsize, a spokesman said.
The weather had been relatively calm.
The incident happened right by the so-called Calypso Deep, which reaches about 5 kilometres to the seabed and is the deepest point in the Mediterranean Sea. This means that recovering the wreck is as good as impossible.
In the wake of the disaster, the United Nations urged the need for safe refugee routes.
“This is yet another example of the need of member states to come together and create orderly safe pathways for people forced to flee and for comprehensive action to save lives at sea,” Stéphane Dujarric, the spokesman for UN Secretary General António Guterres said on Wednesday in New York.
German Development Minister Svenja Schulze spoke to Welt-TV about the need for safe and legal routes to Europe saying: “If one embarks on a journey across the sea, in said conditions, then one must be desperate.”
That is why legal immigration needs to be possible “for those who want to work here for example,” she added.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen tweeted that she was deeply saddened by the many deaths and very concerned about the number of missing people. “We must continue to work together, with Member States and 3rd countries, to prevent such tragedies.”
Just last week, after long negotiations, the interior ministers of EU countries agreed to implement harsher asylum procedures in the European Union to restrict undocumented migration.
In recent years, Greece has massively tightened controls on its waterways to prevent irregular migration, which has led smugglers and refugees to increasingly choose dangerous long routes from Turkey or Middle Eastern states south, past Greece directly to Italy.
Since 2014, more than 20,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean, according to the UN.
In what was probably the worst disaster on the Mediterranean to date, more than 1,000 people lost their lives off the Libyan coast in April 2015.
GNA