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Child drowns at sea off Greece in first fatality after Turkey opens border

[March 02, 2020] By Lefteris Papadimas and Alkis Konstantinidis

KASTANIES/LESBOS, Greece (Reuters) - A child died after being pulled from the sea when a boat capsized on Monday off the Greek island of Lesbos, Greek officials said, the first reported fatality since Turkey opened its border last week to let migrants reach Europe.

Separately, two Turkish security sources told Reuters a Syrian migrant had died from injuries on Monday after Greek security forces intervened to prevent migrants crossing from Turkey into Greece, but Athens branded the claim "fake news".

More than 10,000 migrants, mostly from Syria, other Middle Eastern states and Afghanistan, have reached Turkey's land borders with EU states Greece and Bulgaria since Ankara said last Thursday it would stop keeping them on its territory.

Greek and Turkish police fired tear gas into crowds caught between the fences in no-man's land over the weekend.

Further south, at least 1,000 migrants have reached Greece's eastern Aegean islands since Sunday morning, Greek police say.

The Greek coast guard said the boat which capsized off Lesbos had been escorted there by a Turkish vessel. Forty-six people were rescued and two children taken to hospital, one of whom could not be revived.

Another dinghy with about 30 Afghans arrived on Lesbos early in the morning, a Reuters journalist reported from the island. Thirty-two others were rescued in the seas off Farmakonissi, a small island close to Turkey, the coast guard said.

"This is an invasion," Development Minister Adonis Georgiadis told Skai TV on Monday.

The latest migrant surge follows Turkey's decision to stop enforcing a 2016 agreement with the European Union whereby it prevented migrants entering the bloc in return for billions of euros in aid.

Turkey, already home to 3.7 million Syrian refugees, has another million arriving on its doorstep from a new surge of fighting in northern Syria and says it cannot handle any more.

WHITE FLAGS

The EU's chief executive Ursula von der Leyen expressed sympathy on Monday with Turkey over the conflict in Syria but said its decision to let refugees and migrants cross into Eurpoe "cannot be an answer or solution".

Von der Leyen was due to visit the Greek-Turkish border on Tuesday with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis.

Greek officials have accused Turkey of orchestrating a coordinated effort to drive migrants across the frontier.

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Migrants from Afghanistan arrive on a dinghy on a beach near the village of Skala Sikamias, after crossing part of the Aegean Sea from Turkey to the island of Lesbos, Greece, March 2, 2020. REUTERS/Alkis Konstantinidis

One Greek policeman accused Turkish soldiers at the Kastanies border gate of "giving cutters" to migrants to cut holes in the fence to get through. Reuters could not independently verify the report.

Migrants on the Turkish side of the border, some holding white flags, called the Greek soldiers and riot police to open the gates to let them through, saying they had kids and women.

A Greek government spokesman said a video circulating on social media showing a young man with wounds to the head laid out on the ground near the border was "fake news". Two Turkish security sources said the Syrian man had died of his wounds.

"We call upon everyone to use caution when reporting news that furthers Turkish propaganda," spokesman Stelios Petsas said on Twitter.

Petsas has said the migrant surge poses "an active, serious, severe and asymmetrical threat to national security".

Prime Minister Boyko Borissov of Bulgaria, which also shares a land border with Turkey, was due to hold talks in Ankara on Monday evening with Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan on the migrant crisis.

Turkey's decision to open its border threatens to reverse an agreement that halted Western Europe's biggest wave of migration since World War Two, the 2015-2016 crisis when 4,000 people drowned in Aegean and more than a million reached Greece.

There are more than 40,000 migrants still living on Greece's Aegean islands in severely overcrowded camps.

More than 60 non-governmental organizations urged the EU on Monday in an open letter to take urgent action to relocate them across the bloc and speed up the processing of asylum claims.

Erdogan, who has long accused the EU of failing to provide enough support to Ankara in the migrant crisis, opened Turkey's border after at least 33 Turkish soldiers sent to Syria to monitor a crumbling ceasefire there were killed last week.

(Reporting by Lefteris Papadimas in Kastanies, Alkis Konstantinidis on Lesbos, Renee Maltezou in Athens and Orhan Coskun in Istanbul; Editing by Gareth Jones)

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