UN: 120 Migrants Forced off Boat, 50 Drowned Near Yemen

By teleSUR

10 August 17

“The suffering of migrants on this migration route is enormous. Too many young people pay smugglers with the false hope of a better future,” a UN representative in Yemen said.

smuggler bringing migrants from Somalia and Ethiopa “deliberately drowned” forced over 120 people into the sea, resulting in up to 50 dead off the coast of Yemen, the United Nation's International Organization for Migration said on Wednesday.

Staffers from the IOM discovered the bodies of 29 migrants on a beach in Shabwa, Yemen during a patrol, having been buried in shallow graves by survivors. At least 22 remain missing, and suspected dead.

Their average age was 16, the UN agency said.

About 42 of the migrants are expected to have survived, 27 of them were still present when IOM staffers arrived at the beach.

“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,” the IOM Yemen Chief of Mission, Laurent 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. This is shocking and inhumane,” de Boeck continued.

According to the IOM, around 55,000 people, mostly youth, have left the coutnries in the Horn of Africa to seek work in the Gulf countries. Travelling there usually involves paying illegally operating human smugglers, and passing through the narrow waters aroud the coast of Yemen.

“The suffering of migrants on this migration route is enormous. Too many young people pay smugglers with the false hope of a better future,” de Boeck said.

Smugglers operate through Yemen, which is currently under deadly assault from a Saudi Arabian campaign to reinstall the former government. The war-torn country acts as an easy passage for smugglers because it has no central migration authority that can prevent such activities.