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Three migrants died of thirst when their vehicle broke down in the Nigerian desert as they headed for Libya, the springboard of migration to Europe, said a local official.
"About 10" other pbadengers were rescued after their vehicle was spotted by the Nigerian army, said a senior official in Agadez, a city in the north of the country.
The group was lost looking for one of the two wells of its route and their vehicle broke down, the source said.
"The three victims were Nigerien," said the official.
Death by thirst or heat is a major danger for migrants seeking to cross the Sahara to reach Libya, located in northeastern Niger.
Once in Libya, many try to cross the Mediterranean to travel to southern Europe – a journey in itself notoriously risky.
The military and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) have said their desert patrols in Niger have saved thousands of lives in the past two years.
In some cases, the bus or the pbadenger truck breaks down and in others, they are abandoned by their smugglers.
At the height of 2017, 150,000 people crossed the country, a figure that fell between 5,000 and 10,000, according to a figure quoted by German Chancellor Angela Merkel during a visit to Niamey may's beginning.
The application of a 2015 law that provides for prison terms of up to 30 years for traffickers is one of the factors behind this fall.
One of the consequences, however, is that smugglers are more likely to move at night and on new or poorly used roads, which increases the risk of an accident, experts said.
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