 "A rescued migrant boy wrapped with a thermal blanket")
At least four people have died and hundreds are believed to be missing after a migrant boat capsized near the Greek island,Crete on Friday and a desperate effort was underway to find them, the coastguard spokesman Nikos Lagadianos said.
The spokesman of Greece coastguard said that at least 340 people had been rescued, and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) said the vessel is believed to have left Africa with at least 700 migrants on board.
It was the second migrant vessel found in that area of the southern Aegean Sea since last week, indicating that people smugglers may be forging a new route to avoid North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) ships.
Meanwhile, the bodies of at least 104 migrants have washed up on a beach in the western Libyan town of Zwara but the toll is expected to rise as an average boat carries 115-125 passengers, the libyan navy spokesman Colonel Ayoub Qassem said on Friday. More information is expected to come regarding this incident in the next few hours.
A Greece coastguard spokeswoman told AFP that a major rescue operation was underway, including four ships that were passing through the area, in clear but windy conditions about 75 nautical miles south of Crete.
"The number of people in distress could be counted in the hundreds," she said.
She informed, it was not immediately clear where exactly the boat had left from or where it was headed, or the nationalities of those on board.
The spokeswoman said a passing ship spotted the sinking vessel off Crete and the coastguard rushed two patrol boats, a plane and a helicopter to the scene.
About half of the 25-metre-long boat was completely underwater, the spokeswoman added.
The deaths are the first in Greek waters since April, as a controversial March deal between the European Union (EU) and Turkey, designed to halt the flow of migrants using the popular Aegean route, has led to a sharp drop in traffic.
Nevertheless, some 204,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe since January, the United Nations refugee agency said on Tuesday.
More than 2,500 people have died trying to make the perilous journey this year, the vast majority of them on crossings between Libya and Italy, as Europe battles its worst migration crisis since World War II.
The most recent deadly incident in the Aegean dates back to early April when four women and a child drowned off the island of Samos.
Greek tourist islands in the Aegean witnessed the arrival of hundreds of thousands of people crossing in flimsy boats from nearby Turkey last year, many of them refugees fleeing the war in Syria.
But the number of people using that route has reduced to a trickle after the EU-Turkey deal, under which migrants landing on the islands can be sent back to Turkey, as well as the deployment of NATO ships in the Aegean.
The IOM said its observations supported the theory of a possible new migrant route, reporting a surge of new arrivals to Greece further south, on sea lanes connecting North Africa to the island of Crete.
On May 27, the Greek coastguard intercepted a boat off Crete carrying 65 Syrian, Afghan and Pakistani migrants, under the control of two suspected people traffickers — a Ukrainian and an Egyptian.
