Six children among latest refugee drownings off Greece

At least 13 refugees, six of them children, drowned as two boats making the hazardous crossing from Turkey capsized in the Aegean Sea off Greece yesterday, the coastguard said.

Ten bodies — including six children, four of them babies — were found in the vessel’s cabin while that of a girl was washed up on the island, where dozens of refugees have perished trying to reach Europe in recent days.

Two others were missing with coastguards saying 15 people were plucked from the water.

A boat from the European border agency Frontex also recovered two bodies near the island of Farmakonnisi, near Samos, the coastguard said.

Frontex also rescued three others, who said their boat was carrying 15 people when it sank in Turkish waters.

Greek authorities and the Turkish coastguard “continue to search the zone to find the migrants who disappeared in the sinking, which probably took place off the Turkish coast,” a representative of the Greek coastguard’s press office told AFP.

The new sinkings add to a string of refugee boat tragedies since Monday off the Greek islands of Lesbos, Kalymnos and Rhodes in which more than 60 people have drowned, at least 28 of them children. On Friday alone 22 people, including 17 children, lost their lives trying to cross to the eastern Aegean islands from Turkey, to which more than 2m Syrian refugees have fled.

That followed another black day on Wednesday when 24 migrants, 11 of them children, died in five shipwrecks off Lesbos, Samos and Agathonisi.

With the arrival of rough winter weather, and fears that Europe is about to close its doors to refugees, more than 80 people, most of them children, have drowned trying to reach Greece in October, according to an AFP count.

Since the beginning of the year, 580,125 migrants have landed on Greece’s shores, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, with a total of 723,221 crossing the Mediterranean to Europe.

Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras said on Friday that the drownings were a “humanitarian tragedy” and a “shame” for Europe.

He is to travel to Lesbos this week with the president of the European parliament, Martin Schultz, his office said.

Political talks in Germany, the EU’s top destination for refugees, failed to produce a consensus on how to handle the influx.