Six dead migrants were discovered on Tuesday on a coast of the Greek island of Lesbos, where searches were underway to find their boat and possible other victims, we learned from the port police.
According to the first information from the coast guard, “four bodies were discovered on a coast near the port of Mytilene”, capital of the Aegean island and “two others were fished out of the water”.
They are three men and three women, whose bodies have been transferred to the island hospital for an autopsy, according to an official from the Coast Guard press office.
Three port police patrol boats and a helicopter were involved in the search, according to a local source.
The island of Lesbos, less than ten nautical miles from the Turkish western coast, is a usual passage for migrants coming from Asia and the Middle East via Turkey to Western Europe.
Greece with the help of Frontex, the European border surveillance agency, has considerably tightened controls in recent years limiting the arrival of migrants on these islands in the north-west of the Aegean.
During the great migration crisis of 2015, almost a million people passed through these islands in Greece on their way to Western Europe.