Tuesday, 05 July 2011
People waiting to board a boat to take them across the Gulf of Aden. (File photo)
Only three people were rescued, the state-linked news agency Sudanese Media Center said, quoting officials in Port Sudan.
“One hundred and ninety seven people from neighboring countries drowned in the Red Sea, inside Sudanese territorial waters, following the burning of a boat that was illegally transporting them to Saudi Arabia,” the semi-official Sudan Media Centre said, citing officials.
They said the people-trafficking operation was planned and implemented in the locality of Tokar, which is about 150 kilometers (93 miles) south of Port Sudan, near the border with Eritrea, and that four Yemenis, who allegedly owned the Cuban-flagged boat, had been arrested.
A separate attempt to smuggle 247 migrants, mostly from Somalia, Eritrea, Chad, and Nigeria, also through Sudan’s coastal region of Tokar, had been foiled, according to the same report.
According to the SMC report, the dead were all from Sudan’s neighboring countries but it did not say where the boat had started its journey.
Somali refugees, fleeing their war-torn country, often try going to Saudi Arabia via the sea with the help of smugglers. Many end up first in the kingdom’s poor southern neighbor Yemen, which is closer to Somalia.
(Sara Ghasemilee, a senior editor at Al Arabiya English, can be reached at: sara.ghasemilee@mbc.net)
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