According to authorities, 16 migrants have perished in shipwrecks off the beaches of Tunisia and Western Sahara as North Africa deals with an increase in maritime crossings to Europe.
In search of a better life, people from other regions of the continent, principally irregular migrants and asylum seekers, have made risky trips along much of the North African coast.
According to a local court spokeswoman, Faouzi Masmoudi, the death toll from a shipwreck off the coast of Sfax, the second-largest city in Tunisia, has been revised from four to at least 11.
Masmoudi stated that 57 individuals were aboard the boat, all from sub-Saharan African nations, and that another 44 are unaccounted for.
In the Mediterranean Sea, close to Tunisia’s Kerkennah Islands, survivors of the sinking claimed that the improvised vessel had left during the weekend from a beach north of the coastal city of Sfax.
Units of the coastguard were looking for further survivors, Masmoudi said AFP.
Only 130 kilometres (80 miles) separate Sfax from Lampedusa, an island off the coast of Italy.
The deaths of five migrants, all from Senegal, had been found, according to Moroccan authorities, while 189 people had been saved when their boat sank off the coast of Western Sahara.
A military source informed Rabat’s state-owned MAP news agency that the 11 migrants in “critical condition” and the five bodies were taken to a hospital in Dakhla, the second city in the disputed Western Sahara on the Atlantic coast.
The source said the boat was found off the coast of Guerguart, just north of Mauritania, having departed from “a country located south of the kingdom” and was its route to Spain’s Canary Islands.
It was in a “difficult situation”, the source added.
The migrants who were rescued, including at least one woman, were taken to Dakhla on Sunday and handed over to Moroccan authorities, according to the source.
Deadliest Migration Route
Migrant deaths have surged in recent years as thousands flee war or crushing poverty, seeking to cross the Mediterranean in the hopes of finding better lives in Europe.
The central Mediterranean migrant crossing from North Africa to Europe is the world’s deadliest with more than 20,000 fatalities since 2014, according to the International Organization for Migration.
According to survivor testimony, at least 30 migrants are missing after two unrelated sinkings near Lampedusa of boats that departed last week from Sfax.
Authorities in Tunisia found the bodies of 12 migrants that washed ashore north of Sfax between Friday and Sunday, but it wasn’t immediately clear whether they were related to the shipwreck near the Kerkennah Islands, located just across from Sfax.
Masmoudi said authorities were investigating “whether there have been other shipwrecks in this area”.
According to Tunisia’s interior ministry, 901 bodies had been recovered this year by July 20 following maritime accidents in the Mediterranean, while 34,290 migrants had been rescued or intercepted.
Most of them came from sub-Saharan African countries, it said.
Nearly 90,000 migrants have arrived in Italy this year, according to the UN refugee agency, with most of them having embarked from Tunisia or neighbouring Libya.
Crossing attempts multiplied in March and April following an incendiary speech by President Kais Saied who had alleged that “hordes” of sub-Saharan migrants were causing crime and posing a demographic threat to the mainly Arab country.
Xenophobic attacks targeting black African migrants and students have increased across the country since Saied’s February remarks, and many migrants have lost jobs and housing.
Since early July, hundreds of migrants have been driven out of Sfax after a Tunisian man’s death in an altercation with migrants.
In the following days, Tunisian police took migrants to the desert and other unhospitable areas near the Libyan and Algerian borders, rights groups and international organisations said.
Humanitarian sources have put their number at over 2,000, with at least 25 reported deaths of migrants abandoned in the Tunisian-Libyan border area since last month.
