CRITICISM over the European Union’s failure to agree to a comprehensive migration and asylum policy mounted today as rescue operations for the shipwreck in Greece reached day three.

A packed fishing vessel carried hundreds of people capsized and sank in the early hours of Wednesday.

As many as 500 passengers may have gone down with the trawler, which was travelling from Libya to Italy, according to the International Organisation for Migration.

The Greek coastguard said that the search-and-rescue operation would be extended beyond the standard 72 hours.

Rescuers pulled 104 survivors from the water and later recovered 78 bodies but have not located any more since late on Wednesday.

The scale of the disaster put fresh pressure on both the Greek government and the EU.

Protests took place across Greece on Thursday in anger over government’s pushback policies, including a gathering outside Propyleia University and one organised by the Communist Party outside parliament in Syntagma Square.

The two protests later merged.

Opposition leader and former prime minister Alexis Tsipras hit out at European countries and called for radical change from the EU for an agreement in migration and asylum that would ensure “legal and safe routes, resettling refugees from third countries to EU member states in a fair way.”

He said: “It is the utmost hypocrisy to count hundreds of dead men, women and children at the bottom of the Mediterranean and for some in Brussels, Athens, Budapest or Berlin to consider international law a ‘luxury’ or ‘obsolete’ and tell us that all we have to discuss is how many euros will be given to countries to host refugees there.”

The UN’s migration and refugee agencies issued a joint statement calling timely maritime search and rescues “a legal and humanitarian imperative” and calling for “urgent and decisive action to prevent further deaths at sea.”

Amnesty International’s Adriana Tidona said: “The Greek government had specific responsibilities towards every passenger on the vessel, which was clearly in distress.

“This is a tragedy of unimaginable proportions, all the more so because it was entirely preventable.”

UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres said: “Let’s be clear: This is not a Greek problem, this is a European problem.

“I think it’s time for Europe to be able, in solidarity, to define an effective migration policy for these kinds of situations not to happen again.”

The EU’s executive commission says the 27-nation bloc is close to an agreement on how member countries can share responsibility.

But Greece and other southern EU nations that typically are the first destinations for Europe-bound asylum-seekers have toughened border protection measures in recent years, extending walls and intensifying maritime patrols.

Nine Egyptian men were arrested and detained and charged today for alleged people-smuggling and participating in a criminal enterprise.

The suspects are due to appear in court Monday.