At least four irregular migrants were killed off Türkiye’s Aegean shores after Greek elements pushed back two life rafts carrying at least 42 asylum-seekers, Türkiye’s coast guard agency said Tuesday.

Acting on a tipoff about a group of asylum-seekers floating in two life rafts near the Dilek Peninsula in the Kuşadası district of western Aydın province, Turkish Coast Guard Command teams rescued 38 foreign nationals who were brought ashore and delivered to medical teams to be treated for hyperthermia, the agency said.

Three of the deceased migrants were men and one of them was a woman, local media reported.

It was not clear how many people were on the boats and coast guard crews continue scouring the region for other possible survivors, Aydın Governor Hüseyin Aksoy informed.

The nationalities of the rescued migrants were not immediately known but one Liberian man named Ibrahim Camara, currently under treatment with his wife at the Söke Fehime Faik Kocagöz State Hospital, told reporters that their boats were halted by the Greek border police.

"They confiscated our phones, belongings and beat us. Then they took us to an unfamiliar location. They left 25 people on a small boat; all of them fell into the sea," Camara said.

Tuesday’s rescue follows a similar instance in the same region last weekend when five other asylum-seekers were killed after a boat carrying 31 people sank off the coast of Aydın’s Didim district and the Turkish coast guard rescued 11 migrants.

Two other bodies from the same shipwreck were found also early on Tuesday, Turkish authorities said, raising the death toll to seven people.

Türkiye frequently accuses Greece of engaging in the illegal practice of pushbacks – summary deportations of migrants without allowing them to apply for asylum. Greece denies that, and in turn accuses Turkish authorities of directing migrant boats to Greek waters.

Thousands of people – mostly from the Middle East and Africa – try to reach the eastern Greek islands from Türkiye every year, seeking a better life in the European Union.

Such perilous journeys across the Aegean and Mediterranean have become worryingly frequent over recent months.

Another group, some 1,300 migrants, were rescued in three spate operations off the southern tip of Italy last Saturday, only two weeks after at least 74 people died when their boat hit rocks near the coast of the country. Italy has reported more than 20,000 irregular arrivals by sea since the start of the year.