Six children died in the disaster, while the police found 36 survivors alive on Samos and three people were rescued.
Greece’s coast guard has found the bodies of eight migrants, including six children, who drowned off the island of Samos, authorities said, in the second migrant shipwreck in the Aegean Sea this month.
Greek police found a further 36 people alive in the northern part of Samos on Monday, while three people, trapped in a rocky area of the island, were rescued by coast guard officers, the coast guard said.
A Greek coast guard official said authorities were alerted about the incident by a nongovernmental organisation and estimated that about 50 people had been on board the vessel.
It was not immediately clear whether anyone else was still missing. The nationalities of the people on the boat were not known.
In a separate incident on the island of Lesbos, an elderly man died as a group of 27 migrants made landfall in a small boat, the coast guard said. Greece, in the southeast corner of the European Union, has long been a favoured gateway to Europe for migrants and refugees from the Middle East, Africa and Asia.
More than one million crossed from Turkey to Greece’s outlying eastern islands in 2015-2016. Many have drowned while attempting the perilous journey in flimsy boats.
The number of arrivals later dropped before surging again last year.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) found that about 54,000 migrants reached Greece in 2024, the second largest number in southern Europe behind Italy. The vast majority of people arrived by sea.
