Five migrants down and 50 missing
People smugglers forced 180 Africans off a boat bound for Yemen
Geneva/Brussels — About 180 young Ethiopian and Somali migrants, many weakened by hunger and drought in their home countries, were forced from a boat into rough seas off Yemen by smugglers on Thursday and 55 were presumed drowned, the UN’s International Organisation for Migration said. It was the second such incident in as many days off Shabwa province in southern Yemen, where 50 teenage African migrants were “deliberately drowned” on Wednesday by a smuggler who forced 120 passengers off his boat, the migration agency said. The agency said it feared the incidents might mark the start of a new trend in people-smuggling that could lead to more deaths. Twenty nine dead bodies washed up on the shore after Wednesday’s tragedy while twenty-seven others made it alive to the shore, it said. “They were shocked, exhausted and quite desperate,” Laurent de Boeck, the UN migration agency Yemen chief of mission, said in an interview in Brussels. Smugglers were pushing migrants into the sea away f...
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