At least 13 migrants, six of them children, drowned as two boats making the hazardous crossing from Turkey capsized in the Aegean Sea off Greece on Sunday, the coastguard said.
The first tragedy occurred off the island of Samos when a boat overturned just 20 metres from shore.
Ten bodies -- including six children, four of them babies -- were found in the vessel’s cabin while that of a girl was washed up on the island, where dozens of refugees have perished trying to reach Europe in recent days.
Two others were still missing with coastguards saying 15 were plucked from the water.
A boat from the European border agency Frontex also recovered two bodies near the island of Farmakonnisi, near Samos, the coastguard said.
Frontex also rescued three others, who said their boat was carrying 15 people when it sank in Turkish waters.
Greek authorities and the Turkish coastguard “continue to search the zone to find the migrants who disappeared in the sinking, which probably took place off the Turkish coast,” a representative of the Greek coastguard’s press office told AFP.
The new sinkings add to a string of migrant boat tragedies since Monday off the Greek islands of lesbos, Kalymnos and Rhodes in which more than 60 people have drowned, at least 28 of them children.
Since the beginning of the year, 580,125 migrants have landed on Greece’s shores, according to the UN refugee agency UNHCR, with a total of 723,221 crossing the Mediterranean to Europe.