Dozens of migrants missing off the coast of Yemen after smugglers forced them overboa

Dozens of migrants missing off the coast of Yemen after smugglers forced them overboard

AP, News Corp Australia Network
11 minutes ago


FIVE migrants are dead and another 50 are reported missing after smugglers forced them from a boat off the coast of Yemen in the second such drowning in two days, the UN migration agency said overnight.

The International Organisation for Migration statement came less than a day after it said up to 50 migrants from Ethiopia and Somalia were “deliberately drowned” by a smuggler in a separate boat off Yemen.

Up to 180 migrants were forced from the boat in the latest incident on Thursday morning, the IOM said.

“This is shocking and alarming,” said Laurent de Boeck, the IOM’s chief of mission in Yemen. “They were dropped at sea but closer to the beach this time.” He said staffers at the scene had found five bodies.

The narrow waters between the Horn of Africa and Yemen have been a popular migration route despite Yemen’s ongoing conflict. Migrants try to make their way to the oil-rich Gulf countries.

On Wednesday, a smuggler forced more than 120 migrants into the sea as they approached Yemen’s coast, the IOM said. Its staffers found the shallow graves of 29 of the migrants on a beach in Shabwa during a routine patrol. The dead were buried by those who survived. At least 22 migrants remained missing. The passengers’ average age
was around 16, the IOM said.http://i.imgur.com/jfiRmqS.png

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“The survivors told our colleagues on the beach that the smuggler pushed them to the sea when he saw some ‘authority types’ near the coast,” de Boeck said. “They also told us that the smuggler has already returned to Somalia to continue his business and pick up more migrants to bring to Yemen on the same route.”

De Boeck called the suffering of migrants on the route enormous, especially during the current windy season on the Indian Ocean. “Too many young people pay smugglers with the false hope of a better future,” he said.

The IOM says about 55,000 migrants have left Horn of Africa nations for Yemen since January, with most from Somalia and Ethiopia. A third of them are estimated to be women.

In Ethiopia, people expressed their outrage on social media. “This is an unprecedented level of cruelty,” wrote one Facebook user, Behailu Talegeta.

Despite the fighting in Yemen, African migrants continue to arrive in the war- torn country where there is no central authority to prevent them from travelling onward. The migrants are vulnerable to abuse by armed trafficking rings, many of them believed to be connected to the armed groups involved in the war. The conflict itself is a deadly risk. In March, Somalia’s government blamed the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen for an attack on a boat that killed at least 42 Somali refugees off Yemen’s coast.

Some Somalis are desperate to avoid years of chaos at home with attacks by homegrown extremist group al-Shabab and deadly drought.

Some Ethiopians have left home after months of deadly anti-government protests and a 10-month state of emergency.

More than 111,500 migrants landed on Yemen’s shores last year, up from around 100,000 the year before, according to the Regional Mixed Migration Secretariat, a grouping of international agencies that monitors migration in the area.

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