Athens, June 16, (dpa/GNA) – The Greek coastguard on Friday expanded the search area, after a migrant boat sank off the country’s coast earlier this week, in one of Europe’s worst migration-related disasters.
With almost no chance of finding further survivors, media reports said the search would be formally called off during the course of the day.
On Thursday evening, nine of the 105 survivors were arrested in the port city of Kalamata. According to the coastguard, they are all Egyptian men aged between 20 and 40. They are accused of causing death through negligence, human trafficking and being members of a criminal organization.
The survivors were being taken to a reception centre to the north of Athens for registration, and for them to apply for asylum.
The fishing boat, which is thought to have been carrying between 500 and 700 passengers, went down in international waters around 50 nautical miles south-west of the Peloponnesian Peninsula, in the early hours of Wednesday.
Panic is reported to have broken out aboard. This may have led the overloaded vessel to capsize. The authorities believe it sank suddenly, with passengers below deck having no chance to escape.
So far, 78 bodies have been recovered.
The government ordered a three-day state mourning after the tragedy.
The question of who is responsible for the deaths is a subject of heated dispute.
“It’s a crime – where are the guilty people?” was the headline of the Greek left-wing newspaper Efimerida ton Syntakton on Friday.
Left-wing politicians are blaming the conservative government of the past four years.
Due to the stricter sea traffic controls introduced by the government, smugglers are now choosing more dangerous, longer routes past Greece and directly to Italy.
The incident and debate come at a time of domestic political instability in Greece, after the elections in May left them without a government. An interim government of technocrats is in charge until elections on June 25.
On Thursday, Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing Syriza and largest opposition party blamed the coastguard, asking the interim minister for citizen protection, Evangelos Tournas, why they did not intervene.
He explained that intervention in international waters was not possible if the boat’s captain refused.
GNA