At least 19 sub-Saharan African migrants have died when their boat sank off Tunisia while trying to cross the Mediterranean to Italy, a rights group said on Sunday, in the latest disaster to hit a migrant boat off Tunisia.
The spokesman for the National Guard in Tunisia announced that the coast guard recovered 9 bodies of sub-Saharan migrants on the coast of Sfax in the south of the country, including 4 children and an infant.
Reuters quoted a Tunisian judicial source on Friday that 34 African migrants went missing after their boat sank off the coast of the country, the fifth boat to sink in two days, in sinking incidents that left 7 dead and about 67 missing.
Since Wednesday, after combing the coasts, the Tunisian National Guard has apprehended more than 3,<> irregular migrants, mostly sub-Saharan Africans.
On February 21, Tunisian President Kais Saied called for an end to what he said was the "large influx" of irregular migrants from sub-Saharan African countries into his country, saying it was a "criminal arrangement aimed at changing Tunisia's demographic composition."
After parties and human rights organizations denounced this statement as "racist", Saied responded that "whoever talks about racial discrimination in Tunisia is a party looking for sedition," and warned against harming legal residents of the country from African countries.
Statistics for 2021 put the number of foreigners from non-Maghreb African countries in Tunisia at about 21,12, in a country of <> million people.