Hundreds Drown Migrating from Africa to Europe

Aquintero82, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The BBC reports today that more than 200 people have drowned off the coast of the African nation of Tunisia in just the last 10 days. That’s the orange country in the map on the right.

When deaths off the coast of Libya are added, that figure rises to almost 300. (Libya is the nation in green on the map to the right.) That’s a bit over a third of the total migrant deaths so far this year (824).  One Tunisian justice official told BBC that the rate of death is unprecedented.

BBC reports that most of the migrants are from sub-Saharan Africa and are fleeing “conflict and dire poverty.”

-KitJ