At around 8:45 A.M. in Greece, a boat with 46 Middle East refugees aboard has sunk and 26 of them went missing.

The coast guard has been searching for the missing passengers off the eastern Aegean island of Lesbos. The refugees, according to UK Yahoo News, crossed from the nearby Turkish coast toward Greece.

A Lithuanian helicopter from the European border patrol agency Frontex spotted some people in the sea off the southern coast of the island of Lesbos on Sep. 20, early Sunday. Moreover, two coast guard vessels headed to the said area and have rescued 20 refugees.

The survivors said that there were a total of 46 people on board the boat that sunk. However, there was no immediate information regarding on their nationalities.

There have been hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers, mostly Afghans and Syrians who fled their homes with conflicts, have arrived in Athens, Greece.

It is stated by The Washington Post that Syrian refugees arrived at the Hungarian border without any knowledge what would happen to them. They were then informed to go west, to Austria, this weekend.

Thousands are still coming today while Hungary, Croatia, and Slovenia let them pass through from border to border. This new influx has further increased tensions between neighboring countries as eastern European nations struggle to cope with the increasing number of refugees that try to find a path westward.

Romanian Foreign Minister, Bogdan Aurescu, and Austrian Chancellor, Werner Faymann, disagreed on Hungary building a barbed fence just last week at the border to keep out more refugees from coming in. This resulted in making the migrants change course back toward Croatia as tear gas and water cannons were unleashed on them, trying to cross over.

As it was, Budapest got angry when Croatia sent the refugees by train on Friday night, with 1,000 migrants aboard. However, on Saturday, the two nations coordinated and helped the people to move on toward their preferred destinations, to Sweden or Germany.

TagsMiddle East refugees, island of Lesbos, Romania, Austria, Greece