Five killed after migrant boat hits coast guard vessel off northwest Turkey

ANKARA: Five people were killed and another severely wounded when a boat carrying migrants hit a Turkish coast guard vessel off northwest Turkey on Sunday, a local governor’s office said, adding a search operation was underway for a missing person.

In a statement, the governor’s office said a high-speed boat carrying 34 migrants and one migrant trafficker hit the coast guard vessel off Ayvalik district’s Badavut coast.

“As a result of the search and rescue operations in the region, it was determined that 5 people who fell into the sea lost their lives. One person, a woman, was severely wounded and sent to hospital,” it said, adding authorities were still searching for one missing person.

An investigation has been launched into the incident by the Ayvalik prosecutor’s office, it said.

The Aegean Sea is a frequent transit route for migrants attempting to cross from North Africa and the Middle East into Europe.

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Earlier, three young sisters drowned when the rubber boat carrying them and dozens of other migrants got into difficulties on the perilous central Mediterranean crossing from Libya to Italy, a German sea rescue charity said on Sunday.

RESQSHIP said the bodies of the sisters, aged 9, 11 and 17, were found inside the boat, which was “dangerously overcrowded” and had been buffeted by waves of up to 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) before a rescue vessel arrived at the scene.

Among the 65 people rescued by the charity’s Nadir vessel were three pregnant women, children, and a seven-month-old baby. One person fell overboard earlier in the crossing and remains missing, RESQSHIP added in a statement.

It did not give details about the nationality of the three dead girls.

The Nadir intercepted the rubber boat, which had departed from Zuwara in Libya overnight on Friday, after being alerted by the hotline rescue operator Alarm Phone, the charity said.

Italy’s coastguard evacuated 14 people – medical cases and their relatives – on Saturday afternoon and took them to the southern Italian island of Lampedusa, where the Nadir arrived later in the day with the remaining survivors and the bodies of the three girls.