14 dead off Crete as Greece pulls 180 more migrants from the sea

Greek coast guard crews pulled 13 bodies from a migrant boat found sailing south of Crete early Monday. One of the 18 people rescued from that same vessel died later at a health center on the island, bringing the toll to 14. Authorities have released no details on who was on board or what killed them.

A second boat off Crete left eight people dead, according to AFP, with about 28 survivors — all Sudanese nationals — plucked from the water by a nearby boat and transferred to a police vessel headed for Crete. Maritime police launched the emergency rescue late Saturday after a boat sent out an alarm signal, with strong winds making the sea brutal. Two Sudanese citizens, one of them 16, were arrested after survivors identified them as suspected smugglers.

The rescues kept coming. More than 180 people were found Monday morning on three boats crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa toward Crete, the latest in a steady flow out of Libya. Another three boats south of Crete — carrying roughly 47, 40 and 100 people — were spotted by aircraft or drones from the EU border agency Frontex and were also due to be taken to Crete.

That Libya-to-Crete corridor is the busiest section of the eastern Mediterranean, which Frontex in October called the EU's most-trafficked migration route. The agency logged about 31,800 crossings in the first three quarters of 2026, down 15% from the same stretch last year, with irregular entries into the bloc down by a third overall. Last month, 12 people, including an infant, died when two boats traveling from Turkey to Lesbos and Samos capsized.

Off Senegal, the death toll from a capsized migrant boat now stands at 39 after more bodies were found Monday, emergency services said. The ministry had put the figure at 21 a day earlier. The boat left Saint-Louis in the north bound for Spain and overturned Sunday offshore from Kébémer, north of Dakar. Several passengers are still believed missing, and only one person was pulled out alive.

Thousands of young Senegalese take that Atlantic route in uncovered wooden canoes, roughly 800 miles across open ocean, as the country battles an economic crisis and high youth unemployment. President Bassirou Diomaye Faye offered condolences and vowed to clamp down on the networks behind the crossings.