Eleven migrants, including four babies, two children and five women, drowned after a plastic boat carrying around 30 refugees capsized off the Greek island of Samos in the Aegean Sea. The Greek coastguard said the boat had capsized on Sunday after it crashed against rocks on the coast, just six meters away from the shore, according to Greek Reporter.
Bodies of eleven victims were recovered from the shipwreck and fifteen other boat occupants were rescued by the coastguard. "We recovered 11 drowned bodies, 10 of which were trapped inside the vessel's cabin," a coastguard official told Reuters. The victims were attempting to make the hazardous crossing from Turkey to Europe.
A coastguard spokeswoman confirmed the victims included five women, four infants and two children. A search operation was underway to find at least two missing migrants, she said.
The Samos boat sinking is latest in the string of migrant boat tragedies off the Greek shore. At least 22 migrants, including 17 children, died in two boat tragedies off the Greek coast in the Aegean sea on Friday, according to Press TV.
Greece's Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras, in a harsh speech to Parliament last week, slammed the European Union and its member countries for their inability to deal with the waves of migrants in the Aegean Sea.
"I feel shamed as a member of this European leadership, both for the inability of Europe in dealing with this human drama, and for the level of debate at a senior level, where one is passing the buck to the other," he told Parliament, according to Telegraph.
"These are hypocritical, crocodile tears which are being shed for the dead children on the shores of the Aegean. Dead children always incite sorrow, but what about the children that are alive who come in thousands and are stacked on the streets?" the Greek premier said.
The United Nations' refugee agency, UNHCR, said that about 580,000 migrants have arrived on Greece's shores since the beginning of the year.
