ATHENS: Greek rescuers were searching for survivors on Friday after a migrant boat sank off the island of Crete, leaving at least nine people dead and hundreds feared missing.

“Until this point 340 (people) have been rescued and nine bodies have been recovered,” the Greek coastguard said in a statement, without giving details on the migrants’ nationalities.

Three ships and a coastguard vessel in addition to two helicopters were searching the waters off the Greek island of Crete where the boat, believed to have come from Africa with hundreds of migrants on board, capsized.

The International Organi­sation for Migration (IOM) earlier said the vessel that sank off Crete “is believed to have left Africa with at least 700 migrants on board”.

The Friday sinking marked the second migrant vessel found in that area of the southern Aegean Sea since last week, indicating that people smugglers might be forging a new route to avoid Nato ships.

It was not immediately clear where exactly the boat had left from or where it was headed, or the nationalities of those on board.

A Greek coastguard spokeswoman said a passing ship spotted the sinking vessel off Crete. When rescuers got to the scene, about half of the 25-metre-long boat was underwater, the spokeswoman said.

“The number of people in distress could be counted in the hundreds,” she said.

The deaths are the first in Greek waters since April, as a controversial March deal between the EU and Turkey designed to halt the flow of migrants using the popular Aegean route has led to a sharp drop in arrivals.

Nevertheless, some 204,000 migrants and refugees have crossed the Mediterranean 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.

Published in Dawn, June 4th, 2016