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At least 19 people are dead and 30 are missing after the sinking of a boat carrying migrants on Wednesday off the coast of northern Cyprus, local security forces said.
More than 100 pbadengers about 150 were rescued, but between 25 and 30 people are still missing in the late afternoon, said the North Cyprus Security Force (GKK).
The rinks sent by North Cyprus and Turkey are busy finding people missing in the wake of this sinking whose cause is not yet determined, according to the GKK.
According to the DHA Turkish news agency, the boat was carrying Syrians attempting to reach Europe, but this information could not be confirmed from an official source in the immediate future.
The sinking of this boat occurred at 16 nautical miles from the city of Gialousa ("Yeni Erenköy" in Turkish), located in the northern part of the island of Cyprus, according to the security forces of North Cyprus.
Cyprus is divided since 1974, when the Turkish army invaded the northern third in response to a coup d'etat of Greek Cypriots wishing to link the island to Greece, which worried the Cypriot-Turkish minority.
Today, the self-proclaimed Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (TRNC) is only recognized by Ankara and reunification talks have been suspended since the failure of UN-sponsored negotiations in 2017.
Several deadly shipwrecks of migrants and refugees attempting to reach Europe have occurred in recent months in the Mediterranean Sea, but such events are still relatively rare near the island of Cyprus. [19659002CyprusamemberoftheEuropeanUnionandahundredkilometersfromtheSyriancoasthasnotreceivedambadiveinfluxofSyrianrefugeessuchasTurkeyorGreece
Since September 2014, however, more than 1,700 migrants reached the Cypriot coasts on board craft. And the authorities of this country of about one million people are sounding the alarm against the growing number of asylum applications.
According to UN figures, Cyprus is in the fourth place of the countries in the number of asylum applications per capita
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