A fishing boat with a total of nine crew members capsized off a group of disputed islets between South Korea and Japan on Wednesday.
According to South Korean media, the 72-ton vessel sank in the early afternoon about 168 kilometres north-east of the islets.
Known in South Korea as Dokdo, or Lonely Islands, the uninhabited rock formation is most famous for the fact that Japan also lays territorial claim to it, calling it by the Japanese name Takeshima (Bamboo Islands). In English the outcrop is known as the Liancourt Rocks.
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Three of the crew members are South Koreans, according to authorities, while the rest hold other, unspecified citizenships.
Meanwhile, the South Korean coastguard has dispatched two patrol vessels and a helicopter on a rescue mission but so far it has only found an empty life raft near the suspected sinking site.
