ALBAWABA - Tunisian officials have detained 12 individuals, including a smuggler engaged in a recent incident that killed 15 migrants when their boat capsized off the Djerba shore, according to a Coast Guard statement released Wednesday.
On Monday, a boat carrying 60 migrants capsized off the shore of the southwestern island of Djerba. The Coast Guard initially reported 12 deaths among the passengers, all Tunisians, including children and a lady, before raising the death toll to 15 people.
Authorities said they had rescued 31 people and were still searching for the rest. The Coast Guard said in a statement Wednesday that the primary smuggler and his wife were among those detained, and officials recovered three cars, a boat, and "large sums of money".
President Kais Saied, who is running for reelection on Sunday, has asked the interior ministry to look into the incident, which he described as "painful and strange".
On Monday, the coast guard said that it had rescued 22 Tunisians, most of them were women and children, off the coast of Kerkennah in the east.
The next day, 36 more would-be migrants, including Tunisians and Egyptians, were rescued off the coast of Bizerte in the north, according to local media.
According to the International Organization for Migration, more than 30,309 migrants have perished in the Mediterranean over the previous decade, including more than 3,000 last year.
Since January 1, the Tunisian rights group FTDES has reported at least 400 migrant fatalities and disappearances in shipwrecks off Tunisia. According to the NGO, over 1,300 individuals died or disappeared off the Tunisian shores last year.
