Migrants die off Italian coast in boat crash crossing from Tunisia
The bodies of six migrants have been found off the Italian shore after a boat that had set sail from Tunisia sank off the island of Lampedusa.
According to The Arab Weekly on March 20th, The United Nations’ Refugee Agency (UNHCR) confirmed that six bodies were found and 40 more are missing.
The Italian coastguard has responded to another crash days before, discovering six more casualties as well as ten survivors.
Poor weather conditions have made the search difficult however the Italian coastguard has support from the European Union’s border agency Frontex.
According to the UNHCR, the survivors found off the Italian coast came from Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Guinea and Mali however boarded the boat in Sfax, a city in Tunisia.
Tunisia continues to struggle to monitor the number of migrants in the country.
It is a common transit point for smuggling gangs and human traffickers carrying groups of migrants up from the Sahara who are then hoping to cross the Mediterranean and enter mainland Europe.
Due to the size of Tunisia’s desert regions and the ongoing political division, it has become a favoured route for smuggling gangs and human traffickers as detection by the authorities is difficult.
Tunisia has begun a deportation plan with more than 7,000 migrants being deported to their country of origin in 2023.
Earlier this year, the Tunisian government proposed their “most anti-immigration move yet” as they looked to legalise the deportation of “irregular migrants” according to Maghrebi on January 27th.
This would have been an extension of an agreement already in place between Tunisian President Kais Saied and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has taken a hard-line anti-immigrant stance since taking office in 2022.
Italy is often the first point of call for boats taking the central Mediterranean route into Europe with the island of Lampedusa sitting between Tunisia and Italy.
Whilst levels of migration are a little up compared to this time last year, they are still dramatically lower than at the same point in 2023, just months after Meloni had taken office.
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