At least 24 dead after migrant boat capsizes off Turkish coast

At least 24 people have died and six were rescued after a boat believed to have been carrying migrants, capsized Monday in Istanbul’s Bosphorus Strait, according to the city's governor's office.  

A coastguard search-and-rescue vessel, seven coastguard carriers, a diving team, two coastguard helicopters, a plane from the Turkish Coast Guard and two boats from Directorate General of Coastal Safety participated in the search-and-rescue operations, the governor's office said in a statement. ​

Search-and-rescue operations have been suspended until sunrise on Tuesday, the statement said.

The Turkish Coast Guard said that 40 people were on the boat, and 12 of them were children, which sank three miles off the coast of Rumeli Kavagi, a small fishing town north of Istanbul close to the Black Sea.

The migrants were thought to be of Afghan origin and heading for the Romanian port of Constanta.

The Turkish Coast guard conducted a search and rescue operation on Monday, with seven coastguard vessels, a helicopter, a diving team and nearby fishing boats involved.

“The wind is making our task very difficult,” said Ali Saruhan, one of the rescuers attempting to recover the bodies. “The boat is a very small one. It’s in fact just a small boat. But they were carrying 40 people in it. We are seeing bodies of children floating in the sea.”

A fisherman who witnessed the disaster claimed that some of the refugees were Syrian.

“We saw someone struggling in the sea. He had a life jacket but was alive,” he told Turkish daily Hurriyet. 

“We pulled him out. His sister was next to him, but she wasn’t alive. We also pulled out a 3- or 4-year-old girl. Unfortunately, she wasn’t alive. A man aged about 25 that we rescued was crying ‘my brother’ in Turkish. He was in shock.”

Another fisherman who at the scene described seeing the “bodies of babies floating in the water".

“Those people [the smugglers] should stand in a war tribunal,” said Kadir Sert.

Thousands of migrants attempting to reach Europe by sea have died in previous years, mostly in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas.

In September, the Turkish Coast Guard caught 82 migrants in a boat off the coast of Istanbul, who had also been attempting to reach Romania.