An official statement on Monday stated that Dakar is working to identify the bodies of “approximately twenty” Senegalese who perished at the end of March after their boat capsized off the coast of Tunisia.
According to a press release from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a Senegalese expedition travelled to Sfax, the starting location in central-eastern Tunisia of the sunken boat, for a mission to identify the bodies.
According to the ministry, who did not specify the number of bodies, “none of the remains retrieved by the Tunisian coast guard belongs to our compatriots” missing in this shipwreck that happened “on the night of March 23 to 24 off the Mediterranean”.
In order to track the recovery and victim identification, the Senegalese embassy in Tunis “will be in constant communication with the (Tunisian) authorities and the Tunisian Red Crescent,” the statement continued.
Since President Kais Saied’s inflammatory speech on illegal immigration on February 21, a number of shipwrecks have claimed the lives of several dozen migrants, and further migrants are still missing.
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.
