Five people have been found dead after a migrant boat sank in the Aegean Sea, Turkey's coast guard announced in a statement.

The vessel, carrying 20 people, sank off the coast of western Izmir province early Friday, according to the statement.

Fourteen people were rescued while one person remains missing. Four boats, a diving team and a helicopter have been deployed as part of ongoing rescue efforts to find the missing person.

The nationalities of the migrants were not immediately clear, according to the coast guard.

Another corpse found near tourist destination

Further south, the body of another migrant was recovered from the sea close to the tourist hotspot of Bodrum in Turkey's southwestern Mugla province.

The Turkish coast guard said it seized a rubber dinghy late Thursday and detained 12 migrants and a suspected smuggler.

The migrants said four others had fallen into the sea as the dinghy tried to escape from the coast guard, the Associated Press (AP) reported. Rescuers found three survivors and recovered the body of the fourth person.

Turkey is a major transit route for migrants, particularly from neighboring Syria, who try to enter the European Union (EU) by boat.

According to the Organization for Migration (IOM), hundreds of migrants leave the Turkish coast every day in an attempt to reach the EU.

More than 33,400 migrants have been intercepted in Aegean waters by Turkish officials so far this year, according to the Turkish coast guard's website. The figure for the whole of last year was 12,600.

Both Turkey and Greece have accused one another of illegal pushbacks of migrants at sea.

With AP and dpa