Final day of search for missing migrants in Greece; hundreds feared dead

ATHENS, Greece — Greece’s coast guard launched its third and final day of a search Friday in the area where a large fishing boat crammed with migrants sank, with hundreds of passengers missing and feared dead.

The round-the-clock effort continued off the coast of southern Greece despite little hope of finding survivors or bodies after none have been found since Wednesday, when 78 bodies were recovered and 104 people were rescued.

Most of the survivors were being moved Friday to migrant shelters near Athens from a storage hangar at the southern port of Kalamata, where relatives also gathered to look for loved ones.

Nine people — all men from Egypt, ranging in age from 20 to 40 — have been arrested and detained on allegations of people smuggling and participating in a criminal enterprise. Twenty-seven of the survivors remain hospitalized, health officials said.

Coast guard spokesman Nikos Alexiou, citing survivors’ accounts, said that passengers in the hold of the fishing boat included woman and children but that the number of missing, believed to be in the hundreds, remains unclear.

The fishing boat carrying the migrants had been traveling from Libya to Italy and was being tracked by the Greek authorities as well as European Union border protection agency Frontex.

Officials at a state-run morgue outside Athens have been photographing the faces of the victims and gathering DNA samples to start the identification process.