Medical staffs carry a survivor on a stretcher outside a warehouse at the port in Kalamata town, on June 14, 2023, after a boat carrying dozens of migrants sank in international waters in the Ionian Sea. (Photo by ANGELOS TZORTZINIS/AFP via Getty Ima The Greek coast guard on Friday defended its response to a ship that went down off the country's south coast and left more than 500 migrants presumed drowned.
Criticism mounted over Europe's yearslong failure to prevent such tragedies.Patrol boats and a helicopter spent a third day scouring the area of the Mediterranean Sea where the packed fishing vessel capsized early Wednesday, in what the U.N.
migration agency said could be the second deadliest migrant shipwreck recorded. The deadliest occurred when a vessel capsized off the coast of Libya en route to Italy in April 2015, killing an estimated 1,100 people.Greek coast guard spokesman Nikos Alexiou said that both coast guard and private ships repeatedly offered by radio and loudspeaker to help the vessel Wednesday while it was in international waters, also heading from Libya to Italy, but they were rejected.READ MORE: Searchers who found children missing for 40 days turned to ayahuasca for helpAlexiou argued that any effort to tow the overcrowded trawler or move hundreds of unwilling people onto nearby ships would have been too dangerous."Υou will have a disturbance, and the people will surge — which, unfortunately is what happened in the end," Alexiou told state-run ERT TV. "You will have caused the accident."Alexiou also said that, after accepting food from a merchant ship, the trawler’s passengers rejected a rope bringing more from a second merchant ship "because they thought the whole process was a way for us to take.