No less than 16 folks drowned, together with three girls and a child, when their boat overturned off the Greek island of Paros, within the third maritime migrant tragedy within the Aegean this week.
The Greek coastguard rescued 63 (sixty one males and two girls) out of 80 folks on the vessel and so they had been safely taken to Paros.
In response to the Greek coastguard, the boat set off from Turkey and was headed for Italy.
Authorities scrambled a search and rescue operation in a single day northwest of Paros. Air and sea belongings had been deployed to the realm, the coastguard stated.
Giannis Plakiotakis, Greece’s transport minister, stated trafficking gangs had been liable for the disasters.
The gangs “are detached to human life, stacking dozens of individuals, with out lifejackets, in vessels which don’t conform to probably the most fundamental of security requirements,” he stated in a written assertion.
Earlier Friday, Greek authorities stated they’d recovered 11 our bodies from the scene of one other shipwreck, when a sailboat carrying migrants sank off an uninhabited islet in southern Greece on Thursday.
One other 90 folks had been rescued in that operation. The coastguard stated preliminary info instructed these migrants had additionally been heading for Italy.
On Wednesday, a ship considered carrying greater than 50 folks sank off the island of Folegandros, with dozens feared lacking.
Greece is without doubt one of the fundamental routes into the European Union for migrants and refugees from Africa, the Center East and past, although the stream has tapered off since 2015-2016, when greater than 1,000,000 folks traversed the nation to different EU states.