At the time, some 750 people were on board a fishing boat carrying a group of migrants to Europe her engine failed on Tuesday evening and she was wrecked in the Ionian Sea87 kilometers off the coast of Greece.

Everything points to it the ship left Libya bound for Italy, the authorities said. For now 79 bodies were found in the waters of the Peloponnese peninsula.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says it fears that hundreds of other people have died in the incident.

One of the survivors of the shipwreck is transferred on a stretcher. Photo: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP

The Coast Guard, which 104 people rescued alive in a complicated operation, he also fears for the hundreds of migrants who are still missing. In addition, due to the fact that no women or children who were also on the ship have yet been rescued.

“they are all men”, the Coast Guard pointed out to the survivors. They would be between 16 and 40 years old, according to El País. The fate of the women and children piled in the hold is unknown according to the testimonies of the rescued men.

“We don’t know what to expect (…) but we know that many traffickers lock people up to maintain control,” government spokesman Siakantaris had told the ERT agency.

To locate the rest of the missing persons in the incident, two patrol boats, three helicopters and nine other vessels are patrolling the sector, one of the deepest areas in the Mediterranean.

The Greek Coast Guard says none of those on board had a life jacket at the time of the shipwreck.