Tunis (HRNW) – Fourteen people from sub-Saharan Africa drowned in the Mediterranean, authorities said Thursday in Tunisia, where black migrants have faced a wave of violence since an inflammatory speech by President Kais Saied.
The drama occurred off the coast of Tunisia’s Sfax region, where a spokesman for the court in charge of the investigation said the dead were from two sunken migrant boats.
Three migrants died and 34 were rescued in one sinking on Tuesday, followed Wednesday by 11 deaths in a separate incident with 20 rescued, the spokesman Faouzi Masmoudi said.
The coastguard, in an earlier statement on Facebook, said its personnel had rescued 54 people “of various sub-Saharan African nationalities”, and recovered 14 bodies, but mentioned only one boat.
The agency said it had prevented a total of 14 attempts to cross the sea and rescued 435 migrants overnight Wednesday-Thursday, almost all from African countries south of the Sahara.
Many black migrants in Tunisia have been made homeless amid a wave of racist violence since President Kais Saied accused them last month of causing a crime wave and representing a “criminal plot” to change the country’s demographic composition.
The North African country hosts around 21,000 undocumented migrants from other parts of Africa, less than 0.2 percent of the population.