43 dead after sinking of migrant boats off Djibouti

The death toll after the wreck of two migrant boats off the coast of Djibouti has been raised to 43, announced Wednesday the UN agency for migration, which still feared missing.

The Search and Rescue teams encountered grim scenes of corpses scattered on the beach in Obock, a port city along the coast after Godaria, where the ships sailed off Tuesday on the northeastern coast of the country. the Horn of Africa.

An AFP journalist also saw corpses in the water before the teams put them in yellow bags lined up on the beach.

The International Organization for Migration said the boats capsized half an hour after the start of their trip.

IOM Djibouti's chief of mission, Lalini Veerbadamy, told AFP that the death toll had been raised to 43 Wednesday.

"This tragic event shows the risks of vulnerable migrants as they innocently seek a better life," she said in a statement.

Sixteen people were rescued after sinking. A survivor told the Djiboutian authorities that his boat had 130 people.

The number of pbadengers on the second vessel remains unclear, as is the nationality of those on board.

Located on the other side of the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, from Yemen and close to Somalia and Ethiopia, an unstable region, Djibouti has become in recent years a transit point for migrants seeking work in the Arabian Peninsula.

Yemen: arrivals are increasing
Named after the name of the city, the Obock region has the particularity of seeing people go both ways: boats filled with Yemeni refugees fleeing ships crossed by the war carrying African migrants who seek better opportunities.

In 2017, 100,000 migrants arrived in Yemen, many wanting to travel to the north of the country to find work in Saudi Arabia and its neighbors.

"The number of new arrivals arriving in Yemen has been steadily increasing since 2012, despite the heightened insecurity and violence that followed the war that erupted in March 2015," IOM said in a statement. its 2018-20 regional migration response plan.

"Arrivals peaked in 2016, when more than 117,000 people arrived in Yemen," the paper added.

This migration continues even as Yemen is facing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world.

According to UN officials, 80% of the population, or 24 million people, need help and nearly 10 million are only one step away from starvation.

IOM said most of the migrants were using Yemen to walk to the hot desert areas of eastern Ethiopia, Djibouti and northern Somalia.

Once in Yemen, they may be subjected to torture, blackmail, badual abuse or forced labor.

In 2017, some 2,900 people, mostly Somalis and Ethiopians, fled the disastrous conditions they had found in Yemen and returned them to Djibouti.

The sea crossing itself has repeatedly proved perilous.

Last year, at least 30 Somali and Ethiopian migrants reportedly fled to Djibouti when their boat capsized off Yemen, when shots were fired at the pbadengers.

In August 2017, dozens of Somali and Ethiopian migrants died after traffickers forced them to get off two boats to Yemen and the sea.

(This story has not been changed by NDTV staff and is generated automatically from a syndicated feed.)