100 Somalian smuggled migrants feared drowned

ABOUT 100 migrants from Somalia are missing and feared drowned in the treacherous waters off the coast of Yemen after smugglers forced them overboard, Yemeni officials and the UN refugee agency said yesterday.

By last night 30 bodies had been found washed up on the shore of the Gulf of Adenand and were buried immediately, a Yemeni security official said.

The waters off the Horn of Africa and Yemen have become some of the most lawless in the world, plagued by Somali piracy — notably the recent hijacking of a Ukrainian vessel with a cargo of heavy weapons.

The area is also a busy crossing-point for migrants fleeing to Yemen from the Horn of Africa, particularly from Somalia, where ongoing violence has killed thousands of civilians.

In Geneva, the UN refugee agency spokesman Ron Redmond said the smugglers’ boat had left Somalia on Monday with 150 people on board.

Later, when their vessel was about 5km off shore, the smugglers forced all but 12 of the migrants overboard, Redmond said. The 12 were put in a smaller boat while the rest tried to swim to shore. Only 47 made it and alerted authorities, he said.

The Yemeni official said the boat was bound for Yemen’s Shabwa province, some 480km south of San’a on the Gulf of Aden coast. He believed between 100 and 118 migrants could have drowned.

The 30 bodies found so far were buried yesterday in Shabwa, in keeping with Islamic customs of quick burial, the official said.

In a sign of how frequent such drownings are, he cautioned that it was not certain whether all the 30 came from the boat, since bodies often float in on the Shabwa shores.

During the first half of September, some 165 bodies were found on the shore and buried, the Interior Ministry said.