At least 29 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa died on Sunday in two new shipwrecks off the coast of Tunisia. A shipwreck with 19 dead was reported by an NGO quoted by Reuters not far from Mahdia, in the central part of Tunisia; the other, which took place a few hours later, by the Tunisian Coast Guard, which again according to what Reuters writes recovered the bodies of ten other people.
In the last four days, five boats carrying migrants on board had been wrecked off the Tunisian coast: almost all, like the one carrying the 19 people who died in the night between Saturday and Sunday, had left from the Sfax area, a area from which the departures of boats and fishing vessels full of people bound for Italy have intensified in recent days.
The Tunisian Coast Guard says it has blocked about 80 boats in the last four days, detaining a total of more than 3,000 migrants. In recent days, the Italian Coast Guard and NGO ships had said they had rescued a total of about a thousand people during various operations.
