Tunisian coast guard finds baby’s body after migrant boat sinks

The Tunisian Coast Guard found the baby’s body on Friday, two days after two boats driven by smugglers sank off the coast. Forty people, including five other children and the girl’s mother, are still missing.

The Tunisian coast guard on Friday found the body of a toddler after a boat carrying illegal African migrants sank off the country’s coast.

A little girl in a pink jumpsuit and a gray wool cap was found in the waters off the city of Sfax between the coast and the island of Kerkenna.

The Coast Guard has calculated that the child could be a citizen of Cameroon, as more than 200 migrants from that country have been rescued off the coast of Sfax in the past two days.

mother is absent

According to the same source, the child’s mother is missing.

The Cameroon Embassy in Tunisia was unable to confirm this information.

Fawzi Masmoudi, a prosecutor and spokesman for the Sfax court, told AFP that two boats carrying illegal migrants from sub-Saharan Africa sank off the city’s coast on Wednesday.

Six people died in the first flood, and 39 migrants were rescued. According to the same source, 12 passengers on the second boat were rescued, and 41 others, including six children, are still missing.

“The bodies of five of these children have since been recovered,” a coast guard spokesman said, adding that among them were a Malian and a Senegalese, while the citizenship of the other three, including the girl rescued on Friday, is still unknown. .

Starting point for illegal crossing into Italy

Sfax, the second largest city in Tunisia, is the starting point for a large number of illegal migrants crossing Italy.

Parts of Tunisian territory are less than 150 km from the Italian island of Lampedusa, and clandestine migration attempts by sub-Saharan Africans, as well as many Tunisians, are regularly recorded.

Migrants who arrived in Italy this week reported paying between 2,000 and 6,000 Tunisian dinars (600 to 1,800 euros) each to cross the Mediterranean.

The departure of African migrants from Tunisia intensified after President Kais Syed delivered a speech on 21 February denouncing illegal immigration as a demographic threat to his country.

Tunisia is going through a major political and economic crisis, which is also causing many Tunisians to try to covertly travel to Europe by sea, risking their lives.

On May 25, the Tunisian National Guard announced the arrest of a major smuggler, already sentenced to a total of 79 years in prison, on charges of organizing the departure of Tunisian migrants, which ended in a shipwreck and 20 deaths.

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