Thirty-four migrants and one suspected smuggler were packed into a fiberglass speedboat when it slammed into a Turkish Coast Guard vessel off Badavut, in the Ayvalık district of Balıkesir province, on Sunday, September 7, 2025. Five of them died. One person is still missing.
The Balıkesir governor’s office described what happened. The Coast Guard’s North Aegean Group Command was running an operation against irregular migration when the speedboat, which the office said was moving at high speed, struck the patrol vessel. Everyone aboard the smaller boat ended up in the water.
Rescuers pulled out five bodies. One person, left with serious injuries, went to hospital. Search teams kept looking for a migrant listed as missing. The Ayvalık Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office opened an investigation, and the reports so far do not say what caused the crash or whether anyone is facing charges.
A short, dangerous crossing
Ayvalık sits across a narrow strip of the Aegean from Greece. Daily Sabah called it a significant departure point for people trying to reach nearby Greek islands, and Hürriyet Daily News noted that many migrants make the “short but perilous route” toward Lesbos, Samos and Rhodes, which serve as gateways to the European Union.
Daily Sabah also pointed to recent deaths near Rhodes and to Greece’s latest policy measures, among them an asylum suspension and detention legislation. It added that Greece has been accused of returning migrants to Turkish waters.
The Turkish accounts say nothing about the weather or the hour of the collision. They also leave open whether the Coast Guard crew was trying to stop the speedboat or had already made contact with it before the impact. Those answers will come from the prosecutors.
Sources
- Five killed in migrant boat crash off western Türkiye (Daily Sabah)
- Five migrants dead after boat collision off Ayvalık (Hürriyet Daily News)
- Göçmen botu kaza yaptı, 5 ölü (Haber Aktüel, citing DHA)
