Four people drowned and at least 20 went missing on Friday after a fishing boat carrying migrants sank off Turkey's Black Sea coast, the Turkish coast guard said in a statement.
At least 38 migrants had been rescued by coast guard boats and commercial ships, as the fishing vessels sank just before dawn off the coast of Kefken, about 200 kilometers east of Istanbul, the statement said.
It said a coast guard plane and two boats were dispatched to the region after a commercial ship reported a distress signal from the fishing vessel.
Ambulances and medical teams were dispatched to the port of Kefken and were waiting for boats carrying the rescued migrants.
It was not clear where the boat was headed and no information was available on the nationalities of the migrants.
As the numbers of migrants crossing the Aegean Sea to reach European Union countries has dwindled, the number of people crossing the Black Sea from Turkey to EU member Romania has being increasing to the hundreds each month.
