Five sub-Saharan migrants have died and five others are missing after their boat sank off the Tunisian coast as they tried to reach Europe illegally, the spokesman for the Sfax prosecutor’s office told AFP on Saturday.
About twenty more migrants were rescued by the Tunisian coast guard after a makeshift boat sank off Sfax, one of the main departure points in Tunisia for migrants seeking to reach Italian shores, added the prosecutor of the first court. Sfax instance. Faouzi Masmoudi.
Thirty people on board
In all, about 30 migrants, men and women, with an average age of 25 and all from sub-Saharan African countries, were on board the ship before it sank, he said.
Search operations were underway looking for missing persons. The investigation has not yet determined the ship’s point of departure, according to Faouzi Masmoudi.
Tunisia, whose parts of the coast are less than 150 km from the Italian island of Lampedusa, frequently records attempts to leave migrants for Italy. Emigration candidates also leave from the coast of neighboring Libya and several shipwrecks have occurred off the Tunisian coast in recent years.
More than 20,000 people dead or missing since 2014
According to the latest official statistics, more than 22,500 migrants were intercepted or rescued off the Tunisian coast in the first ten months of 2022, of whom some 11,000 came from sub-Saharan Africa.
Tunisian authorities sometimes have difficulty intercepting or rescuing migrants due, they say, to a lack of resources.
More than 20,000 people have died or disappeared since 2014 trying to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Source: BFM TV
