More than 300 migrants rescued off Crete, Greek officials say

ATHENS — Greek authorities have rescued over 300 migrants coming mainly from Bangladesh, Egypt, Yemen and Sudan over the last two days, officials said. Nearly half of them were rescued on Monday off the island of Crete, the coast guard said on Tuesday, adding that they were travelling on at least three makeshift vessels. Search operations continued on Tuesday despite strong winds in the area, they said. A coast guard official said the migrants were being held by Cretan police and would be transferred to reception centres on the Greek mainland. Meanwhile, dozens of migrants have been rescued from a small boat in difficulty south of Crete that had crossed over from north Africa, authorities said Wednesday. A Coast Guard statement said 59 men were found on the boat by a patrol vessel from the European Union’s Frontex border agency, some 17 miles southwest of Ierapetra on southern Crete. The boat had set off from Tobruk in eastern Libya, where the migrants had arranged their passage with smugglers. So far this year about 2,300 people have reached Crete from Libya, more than half the total 4,500 migrants who entered the country by sea. Including crossings of the northeastern land border with Turkey, about 6,200 migrants have entered Greece illegally since January 1. Crete has become the main gateway for asylum seekers arriving mainly from Tobruk in eastern Libya, a perilous crossing. Wednesday’s Coast Guard statement said that five migrants believed to have crossed from the nearby Turkish coast were found on Easter Saturday on the islet of Psara off Chios in the eastern Aegean. At the end of March, 22 people died while adrift in the Mediterranean after leaving from Libya and their bodies were thrown overboard, according to survivors who were rescued off Crete. According to data from the International Organisation for Migration, 559 people died in the Mediterranean between January and February, compared with 287 for the same period last year. In March, the European Parliament endorsed a major tightening of the bloc’s migration policy in a bid to stem the crossings, approving the concept of “return hubs,” designed to send migrants to non-EU third countries, like the UK’s Rwanda initiative. Those proposals have been criticised by rights groups as inhumane. Due to the increase in migrant arrivals in Crete during the summer tourist season last year, Greece suspended the asylum application procedure for three months, drawing criticism from the UN and rights bodies. Greece’s conservative government strongly supports moves by the European Union to crack down on illegal migration, including the setting up of “return hubs” outside the bloc to house failed asylum seekers. But tighter EU borders and migration deals with African countries have failed to reduce the number of departures from Africa, but merely temporarily diverted irregular routes, according to a report by the International Centre for Migration Policy Development (ICMPD). — Agencies