At least five people have died after a wooden migrant boat capsized off Greece’s southern island of Gavdos on Friday night, sparking a huge rescue operation.
So far, 39 men onboard the boat, mostly from Pakistan, have been rescued by the cargo ships sailing in the area. They have been transferred to the island of Crete, the Greek coastguard said.
The number of missing people has not yet been confirmed, but survivors of the boat said there were dozens of others onboard. These reports have not been confirmed by Greek officials.
Coastguard boats, naval aircraft, merchant vessels and an Italian frigate have been scouring the area since Greek authorities were alerted about the incident on Friday night as the wooden boat approached Europe’s most southerly point of Gavdos.
More than 100 other people were rescued in separate rescue operations south of the island of Crete, the Greek coastguard said. Three operations involved separate incidents off the island of Gavdos and a fourth off the southern Peloponnese region on the southern mainland.
Coastguard officials believe the boats left together from Libya, but this is yet to be confirmed.
In the two other operations off Gavdos, 136 people were rescued. A Malta-flagged cargo ship rescued 47 migrants from a boat around 40 nautical miles from Gavdos, while 89 migrants were rescued around 28 nautical miles off the tiny island in Greece’s south coast.
Another 28 people were rescued off the Peloponnese, with no one reported missing.
The coastguard was supported by navy helicopters and vessels from the European border protection agency Frontex during its overnight search and rescue missions.
From 2015 to 2016, Greece was the favoured gateway to the European Union for people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Nearly one million people landed on Greek islands, mostly via inflatable dinghies, in this period.
This year, incidents involving migrant boats and shipwrecks near Crete and Gavdos have increased. The United Nations Refugee agency (UNHCR) estimates that 58,226 men, women and children had arrived in the country by 8 December compared with of 48,720 last year.
In 2023, hundreds of migrants drowned in one of the Mediterranean sea’s deadliest ever disasters, when an overcrowded vessel capsized and sank in international waters off the southwestern Greek coastal town of Pylos.
