Five people were pulled alive from the sea off Tunisia. Twenty others were already dead.
The National Guard gave those figures in a statement on Wednesday. Coast guard members sent to a sinking ship found the survivors and recovered the bodies 15 miles (24 kilometers) out, north of Sfax. From that stretch of coast, the Italian island of Lampedusa is roughly 81 miles (130 kilometers) away. The guard has not said how many people were aboard when the boat left shore, and it was still looking for anyone missing.
Sfax is a well-known launch point for migrants who hope to reach Europe by boat. The victims appeared to have drowned.
A coastline that keeps giving up bodies
Tunisia has tightened policing of its borders with help from Europe, aiming to stop deaths at sea and break up smuggling rings. The deaths have not stopped. Just last week, authorities found nine people who appeared to have drowned along the same shoreline.
The boats are part of the problem. Migrants and smugglers rely on iron vessels that are often unfit for open water.
Nobody keeps an official tally, but international groups and Tunisian NGOs believe hundreds have perished this year. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, estimates that more than 1,100 people have died or gone missing in the central Mediterranean off Tunisia and Libya. The Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights puts the figure for Tunisia’s own coast at between 600 and 700.
Fewer crossings, same danger
Crossings have dropped sharply. UNHCR says more than 19,000 migrants have sailed from Tunisia and reached Italy this year, many of them going on to ask for asylum. By the same point in 2023, more than 96,000 had made the trip. Most of this year’s arrivals in Italy came from Bangladesh, Tunisia and Syria.
Families who never make it across leave their own mark on the coast. No official figures exist for the number of migrants living in Tunisia, but thousands are staying in makeshift camps among olive trees close to the Sfax shoreline.
Sources
Sources
- Tunisia recovers the bodies of 20 migrants after shipwreck
- 20 migrants die in a shipwreck off the coast of Tunisia
