ATHENS
\nTwelve migrants drowned in two separate incidents off the Greek islands of Lesbos and Samos in the northeastern Aegean Sea on Monday, after their boats capsized as the coast guard chased them, authorities said. Five men and one woman died after a speedboat carrying migrants from Turkiye made a sudden maneuver and overturned roughly four nautical miles north of Samos, the Greek coast guard said.
\nFourteen men survived and a search-and-rescue operation \u200cwas under way. \u200cAuthorities arrested one of the survivors, \u200can Iranian national, on suspicion of migrant smuggling. Earlier, four men, one woman and an infant died when their boat collided with a Greek coast guard vessel and overturned off the area of Agrilia in Lesbos. Eight survivors were taken to hospital.
\nAuthorities arrested a 37-year-old Turkish national who was among the eight survivors and identified him as the \u200csuspected smuggler and operator of \u200cthe boat. The government vowed \u201czero tolerance\u201d toward migrant smugglers, whom it \u200cblamed for the deaths.
\nOn the incident off Lesbos, \u200cGreece\u2019s shipping minister Vassilis Kikilias said evidence so far indicated the speedboat struck the left side of a coast guard vessel with its bow, adding that the exact circumstances were under \u200cinvestigation. \u201cOur position is non-negotiable: zero tolerance for smugglers,\u201d he said in a post on X.
\nGreece, for years a favored gateway to Europe for migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, was at the front line of Europe\u2019s migration crisis in 2015-2016 and nearly 1 million people landed on its islands, mainly from Turkiye.
\nIt has since toughened its stance and has been accused by human rights groups of forcibly returning migrants and asylum-seekers on its sea and land borders, a practice it denies, saying its coast guard acts with full respect for human lives and rights.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ATHENS Twelve migrants drowned in two separate incidents off the Greek islands of Lesbos and Samos in the northeastern Aegean Sea on Monday, after their boats capsized as the coast guard chased them, authorities said. Five men and one woman died after a speedboat carrying migrants from Turkiye made a sudden maneuver and overturned roughly …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":104576,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104562"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104562\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104587,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104562\/revisions\/104587"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/104576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nabanews.pk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}