The Tunisian coast guard retrieved the bodies of at least 24 migrants after their boat sank off the coast on Tuesday, officials said Thursday. The guard managed to rescue 76 of the migrants aboard the vessel.
Both Tunisians and sub-Saharan African migrants were among the dead after their boat sank off the coast of Tunisia earlier this week.
The deaths were confirmed as the bodies were discovered Wednesday (April 12) and Thursday (April 13).
The Tunisian coast guard managed to rescue 76 migrants from the same shipwreck.
All in all, the National Guard says they have intercepted or rescued more than 14,000 migrants attempting to leave Tunisia in the first three months of this year. The figure is five times the figures recorded in the same period last year, Reuters reports.
At the end of last week, at least 27 migrants died in shipwrecks off the Tunisian coast.
Those deaths came only shortly after Tunisian officials retrieved the bodies of 29 sub-Saharan African migrants following three separate shipwrecks in late March, AFP reports. More were found dead by authorities in Italy too.
Deadliest route
German news agency dpa said it wasn’t immediately clear from where in Tunisia the boat originally departed.
More than 160 people have drowned or gone missing following boat accidents off the Tunisian coast since January, according to the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES).
The numbers are part of a wider general trend of increased numbers of deaths on the central Mediterranean route this year. According to the UN Migration Agency’s Missing Migrants project, the first quarter of 2023 has been the deadliest quarter for migrants in the central Mediterrean since 2017.
The IOM report, released on Wednesday, found that the "increasing loss of life on the world’s most dangerous maritime crossing comes amidst reports of delays in state-led rescue responses and hindrance to the operations of NGO search and Rescue (SAR) vessels in the central Mediterranean."
Since 2014, more than 20,000 people have died on this route, IOM Director General António Vitorino said in a statement. Vitorino added that he fears that deaths on the central Mediterranean have been normalized.
"States must respond," he said. "Delays and gaps in state-led SAR are costing human lives."
Delays in state-led rescues a factor in loss of life, finds IOM
The IOM found that delays in state-led rescues on the central Mediterranean route were a factor in "at least six incidents this year, leading to the deaths of at least 127 people." In addition, "the complete absence of response to a seventh case claimed the lives of at least 73 migrants."
Overall, at least 441 deaths were documented from January to the end of March on the central Mediterranean route. But the true number of those who lost their lives there could be much greater.
Growing numbers of migrants have sought to leave Tunisia as the economic and political situation worsens in the country.
This year, the situation for sub-Saharan Africans started to deteriorate after President Kais Saied made remarks blaming them for violence and crime in the country. His comments led to racist attacks and resulted in many Black Africans getting kicked out of their accommodations or losing their jobs.
Tensions in Tunisia
Numerous protests have taken place about the treatment of Black Africans in Tunisia and some groups of migrants there have demanded that the international community offer them safe haven in a country where they would be welcomed and secure. Others still have taken their fate into their own hands and attempted to gather money to pay the passage across the Mediterranean towards Europe.
This year, Tunisia overtook Libya as a point of departure for boats crossing into Italy. Italy’s island of Lampedusa is situated about 150 kilometers from the Tunisian coast.
According to Italian government figures last updated on April 12, 31,357 migrants have already crossed to Italy by sea since the start of the year. The majority of arrivals have come from Ivory Coast, with nationals from Guinea, Pakistan, Tunisia, Egypt and Bangladesh all accounting for groups of several thousand.
With dpa, AFP and Reuters
This story has been updated to reflect the updated official death toll. Authorities reported an additional 14 dead on Thursday after officials initially reported 10 dead on Wednesday.