A sailboat and a dinghy were reported in difficulty in the Aegean Sea on Monday and Tuesday.
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Search operations were still underway on Tuesday (November 1) in Greece to find 67 people presumed missing, according to statements by migrants. Two separate shipwrecks have occurred in the past 24 hours in the Aegean Sea, the coast guard confirmed.
Since Monday, a similar rescue operation has been underway off the island of Samos in the eastern Aegean Sea, near the western Turkish coast. It aims to find eight people out of the twelve on the boat. It was the four survivors who had given this information to the rescuers.
At dawn on Tuesday, Greek police launched a rescue operation after receiving a distress signal from a struggling sailboat off the island of Euboea, near Athens, where strong winds were blowing. There too, they are survivors – nine people found on an island – who had sounded the alarm, declaring “that a total of 68 people were on board the sailboat”, said Nikos Kokkalas, spokesperson for the coastguard on public television Ert on Tuesday afternoon. A tenth survivor was found by a freighter on Monday, the Greek newspaper reported. I Kathimerini on his website (article in English).
Significant means deployed to avoid a new tragedy
In this second operation, a port police building, a helicopter and two boats sailing in the area are participating in the search for these 59 missing persons, according to the coast guard.
These accidents occur less than a month after two deadly shipwrecks in the Aegean Sea, on October 11, in which at least 30 people died off the islands of Lesbos and Kythera. In the first nine months of this year, Greece has seen an 80% increase in the number of migrant and refugee arrivals from neighboring Turkey compared to the same period in 2021.