By DEREK GATOPOULOS and NICHOLAS PAPHITIS
ATHENS, Greece — Greece’s coast guard defended its actions in responding to a ship carrying hundreds of migrants that ended up sinking off the country’s south coast, as criticism mounted Friday over the European Union’s years-long failure to hammer out a comprehensive migration and asylum policy.
Patrol boats and a helicopter spent a third day scouring the area of the Mediterranean Sea where the packed fishing vessel capsized and sank early Wednesday. The International Organization for Migration said as many as 500 passengers may have gone down with the trawler, which was traveling from Libya to Italy.
“This could be the second deadliest shipwreck we have ever recorded after the tragic shipwreck of April, 2015 on route to Italy,” the U.N. migration agency’s Missing Migrants Project tweeted, referring to a vessel that capsized off the coast of Libya, claiming the lives of an estimated 800 migrants.
The Greek coast said the search and rescue operation would be extended beyond the standard 72 hours. Rescuers pulled 104 survivors from the water and later recovered 78 bodies but have not located any more since late Wednesday.
The scale of the disaster put fresh pressure on both the Greek government and the European Union.
The U.N.’s migration and refugee agencies issued a joint statement calling timely maritime search and rescues “a legal and humanitarian imperative” and calling for “urgent and decisive action to prevent further deaths at sea.”
“The Greek government had specific responsibilities toward every passenger on the vessel, which was clearly in distress,” Adriana Tidona of Amnesty International said. “This is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, all the more so because it was entirely preventable.”
Pope Francis, who was discharged from a Rome hospital Friday nine days after undergoing abdominal surgery, urged European governments to do more to protect people who risk their…
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