According to an official statement issued on Monday, Dakar is looking for the remains of “about twenty” Senegalese migrants who died in the sinking of their boat off the coast of Tunisia at the end of March.
According to a press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a Senegalese mission went to Sfax, the shipwrecked boat’s starting point in central-eastern Tunisia, to identify the bodies.
For the time being, “none of the remains recovered by the Tunisian coast guard correspond to our compatriots” missing in this shipwreck that occurred “on the night of March 23 to 24 off the Mediterranean,” according to the ministry, which does not specify how many bodies were recovered.
The Senegalese embassy in Tunis “will remain in permanent contact with the (Tunisian) authorities and the Tunisian Red Crescent to monitor the recovery and identification of victims”, the statement added.
Several dozen migrants have died in a series of shipwrecks and others have been missing since President Kais Saied ‘s violent speech on February 21 on illegal immigration.
After this speech, a significant part of the 21,000 nationals of sub-Saharan Africa officially registered in Tunisia, most of them in an irregular situation, lost their jobs, which are generally informal, and their housing overnight, as a result of the campaign against the illegals.
Most African migrants arrive in Tunisia to then attempt to illegally immigrate from Europe by sea, with some stretches of Tunisia’s coastline being within 150 kilometers of the Italian island of Lampedusa.
In mid-March, Dakar had repatriated 76 compatriots from Tunisia and neighbouring Libya after the words of the Tunisian leader.