The spokesman for the Tunisian Defense Ministry, Mohamed Zekri, told AFP that twenty corpses of migrants from sub-Saharan Africa were recovered Thursday off the coast of Sfax, east of Tunisia.
Five other migrants were saved and the search is still ongoing to find the other missing. According to initial data, the canoe was carrying about forty people. For his part, the spokesman for the courts of Sfax, Mourad Turki, said that the bodies were transported to the regional hospital of the city to determine the causes of death.
Despite the pandemic context, the crossings to Europe, especially from Tunisia and Libya, have not decreased during this year. On December 16, the Libyan Red Crescent announced that it had found the bodies of four children on a beach west of the Libyan capital Tripoli, following the sinking of their boat.
For its part, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) announced that about a thousand migrants died in the Mediterranean in the first 11 months of 2020. The IOM said that this figure could increase during the month of December and recalled that most of the humanitarian rescue vessels continue to be immobilized for various reasons.
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