UN calls for urgent action to prevent further tragedies as police believe up to 500 people remain missing

Greek authorities have rejected claims that a fishing boat that sank in the Mediterranean this week with the loss of potentially hundreds of lives capsized after the coastguard attempted to tow it, as the UN called for urgent action to prevent further tragedies.

Authorities have confirmed 78 deaths and said 104 survivors – mostly from Syria, Egypt and Pakistan – had been brought ashore, but police believe as many as 500 are missing. Witnesses have reported that up to 100 children were in the ship’s hold.

As anguished family members arrive in Kalamata, search operation continues with negligible progress

Hope dies last and for Kassem Abo Zeed it was running out fast. Hope was the force that had led him to board a plane from Hamburg and fly to Greece after he heard that a boat carrying his wife had capsized off the country’s southern coast.

But by 2pm on Thursday, 36 hours after the blue fishing trawler packed with migrants and refugees had sunk in one of the worst maritime disasters in recent Greek history, hope was fading in a way he had prayed would never happen.

Women also said to have been in the hold, amid fears 78 so far confirmed dead could rise into the hundreds

Survivors from an overcrowded fishing boat that capsized and sank on Wednesday off the Greek coast in one of the worst disasters in the Mediterranean in recent years have told doctors and police that women and children were travelling in the hold of the vessel.

Seventy-eight people have been confirmed dead, but there are fears the number of victims could run into the hundreds.

Hundreds more feared missing from overcrowded fishing vessel that reportedly sailed from Libya for Italy

At least 78 people have died and hundreds more are feared missing in the deadliest refugee shipwreck off Greece this year.

The victims, nearly all of them men from Afghanistan and Pakistan, drowned when the large trawler they were travelling in capsized off the southern Peloponnese.