At least 24 migrants killed as boat capsizes near Istanbul - Financial Times

At least 24 people drowned off the Istanbul coast on Monday morning, as a boat carrying migrants reportedly from Afghanistan and Syria capsized in the Black Sea just north of the Bosporus strait.

Witness reports described bodies of children, some as young as three, floating in the sea amid severe winds that may have flipped the overloaded vessel.

The boat was carrying about 40 people. The Turkish coastguard said seven had been rescued and 24 bodies recovered, as air and sea rescue operations continued.

The disaster is the latest in a series of fatal accidents for would-be illegal migrants packed on to ships by human traffickers. But, unlike many others, it occurred not on the high seas but close to one of the world’s biggest cities.

Turkey currently hosts more than 1.5m refugees from the civil war in Syria and has long been a staging post for people in the Middle East and the broader region seeking to reach western and central Europe.

But the physical obstacles to such attempts have grown more forbidding, particularly on the EU’s land border with Turkey. This summer Bulgaria completed a 33km barbed wire fence to prevent illegal crossings; it has been criticised by the campaigning organisation Human Rights Watch for allegedly forcing refugees back across the border. Greece built a similar 10.5km fence on its border with Turkey in 2012.

The turbulence in the region has tripled the number of migrants arriving in southern Europe by sea. Yet Italy announced on Friday it would end extensive search-and-rescue operations, which are being replaced by EU-funded maritime border patrols.

Many migrants attempt to travel from Turkey to Greece’s Aegean Islands, but the boat in Monday’s accident had travelled up the busy Bosporus strait – a conduit for tankers and container ships as well as commuter vessels – into the Black Sea.

It was reportedly going to Romania, with local press claiming that some of those aboard had paid thousands of euros to human traffickers for the journey.

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