Tunisia: Dozen people die trying to reach Europe as boat capsizes off Djerba
Twelve Tunisians trying to emigrate to Europe, including babies and women, drowned when their boat sank off the coast of the tourist island of Djerba, in southeastern Tunisia, on Monday.
Twenty-nine people were rescued after the boat capsized at dawn, Medenine court spokesman Fethi Baccouche told AFP, adding the dead also included five men and four women.
Baccouche did not give the initial number of passengers or information on possible missing persons.
He added that the cause of the sinking was still unknown.
Coastguard units intervened to "provide assistance to a sinking boat carrying a group of people, Tunisians and 'foreigners'," the National Guard said in a statement.
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The coastguard was "alerted by four passengers who swam back" to the shore, according to the National Guard.
The "foreigners" involved are likely to be sub-Saharan Africans.
Thousands of deaths
Along with Libya, Tunisia is the main departure point in North Africa for people seeking to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe, with a coastline in some places less than 150km from the Italian island of Sicily.
Every year, tens of thousands of people from Africa and the Middle East, fleeing poverty and conflicts in their countries, particularly in Sudan and Yemen, attempt the perilous crossing of the Mediterranean from the Tunisian coast.
Thousands of Tunisians are also trying to leave their country illegally, faced with economic hardship and a clampdown on civil and political rights since president Kais Saied’s power grab in the summer 2021.
Saied, who was elected in October 2019 on a platform promising reform and transparency, dissolved parliament in July 2021 and seized wide-ranging power, marking a halt to the country's democratic transition after the 2011 revolution.
The Tunisian authorities have increased their crackdown ahead of the presidential election scheduled for 6 October, prosecuting and excluding potential candidates of the president in an attempt to secure his re-election.
More than 1,300 people died or went missing in 2023 in shipwrecks off the Tunisian coast, according to the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights (FTDES).
Over the last decade, more than 30,000 people have died in the Mediterranean, including more than 3,000 last year, according to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM).
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