At least 39 people died on Monday when a boat carrying more than 200 migrants sank off the coast of Yemen, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) declared this Tuesday. ).
On Monday, Yemeni sources indicated that at least 30 people died in the sinking, in a first provisional assessment.
“Tragic incident off the coast of Yemen: a boat carrying 260 migrants sank on Monday, causing 39 deaths, 150 missing, 71 survivors”, stated the IOM on the social network X, cited by the AFP news agency.
The IOM did not specify the nationality of the migrants.
According to the EFE news agency, the boat was full of passengers, African men and women, “mostly Ethiopian migrants”, said local fishermen who asked not to be identified.
The accident occurred in the early hours of Monday, when the vessel was heading towards the coast of Ain Ba-Maabad, in the Yemeni province of Shebua.
According to AFP, every year, tens of thousands of migrants from the Horn of Africa take the “Eastern Route” – which crosses the Red Sea – to try to reach the Gulf countries, fleeing conflicts, natural disasters and poor prospects. economic conditions in their countries.
In April, two boats sank off the coast of Djibouti two weeks apart, killing dozens of people.
At least 1,350 migrants have died on the “Eastern Route” since 2014, not counting this year, according to IOM statistics.
Migrants who manage to reach Yemen often face other threats to their safety, as the poorest country on the Arabian peninsula has been wracked by civil war for nearly a decade.
Many of them try to reach Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries, where they can find jobs as laborers or domestic workers.
In August, the organization Human Rights Watch (HRW) accused Saudi border guards of killing “hundreds” of Ethiopians who tried to enter the country from Yemen between March 2022 and June 2023.
Riyadh rejected these accusations, classifying them as unfounded.
