A boat with migrants on board sank near Tunisia. Some passengers have not yet been found.
More than 70 migrants who left Libya to try to reach Europe illegally are missing after their boat sank off the coast of Tunisia, the Tunisian national guard said on Wednesday. The boat, which was carrying a hundred people, capsized off Sfax (central-eastern Tunisia). Coastguard and navy units were able to save 24 migrants, but the others are missing, according to Houcem Eddine Jebabli, spokesman for the national guard.
He specified that the candidates for emigration who were on board the damaged boat were “of different African and Asian nationalities”. “According to the first elements of the investigation, the inflatable boat had left the coast of Zouara in Libya on the night of May 22 to 23 with around a hundred people on board”, he added, specifying that only one body had been recovered.
Fall of the Gaddafi regime
On Tuesday, the Libyan Navy announced that four migrants seeking to reach Europe illegally had died and three were missing after their boat sank off the coast of Mellitah in western Libya.
The chaos that followed the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011 made Libya, a North African country, a favored route for tens of thousands of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, Arab countries and Asia. from South. They seek to reach Europe via the Italian coasts, about 300 km from the Libyan coast.
Several thousand of them find themselves stranded in Libya, regularly singled out by NGOs for the ill-treatment inflicted on migrants. Since the beginning of the year, 6340 migrants have been intercepted and brought back to Libya, according to the report of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) published on Monday. At least 129 people have died attempting the crossing and 459 are missing and presumed dead, according to IOM.
The pace of departures is accelerating
In Tunisia, the Sfax area is one of the main departure points for Tunisian and foreign migrants to the Italian coasts. As summer approaches, the pace of clandestine departures accelerates and many migrants drown. In early May, the Tunisian authorities announced that they had found the bodies of 24 migrants who had drowned after the sinking of several boats off the coast of Sfax.
Italy is one of the main entry points into Europe for migrants from North Africa, arriving mainly from Tunisia and Libya, two countries from which departures increased considerably in 2021. The year In the past, 15,671 migrants managed to reach Italian soil from the Tunisian coasts compared to 12,883 in 2020, according to the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES). Nearly 2,000 migrants were reported missing or drowned in the Mediterranean in the same year compared to 1,401 in 2020, according to the IOM.
