Rescuers have found the bodies of 92 migrants, most
of them women and children, strewn across the
Sahara desert in northern Niger after their vehicles
broke down and they died of thirst, authorities said
yesterday.
Rescue worker Almoustapha Alhacen said the bodies
– 52 children, 33 women and seven men from Niger –
were found on the route from the northern mining
town of Arlit to the Algerian border.
Many were in an advanced state of decomposition and
had been partly devoured by animals, probably
jackals, he said.
Northern Niger lies on a major corridor for illegal
migration and people-trafficking from sub-Saharan
African into north Africa and across the Mediterranean
into Europe.
Most of those who make the perilous journey on
ancient opentopped trucks are young African men in
search of work. Rescuers said the doomed convoy of
women and children was puzzling.
“It’s the first time I’ve seen anything like it,” Alhacen
told Reuters by telephone from Arlit. “It is hard to
understand what these women and children were
doing there.”
Rescuers found many writing slates in the luggage,
suggesting the children may have been students in a
Qu’ranic school being taken to Algeria, perhaps to
beg, Alhacen said.
Alhacen said 19 of the group had reached Algeria by
foot and were repatriated to Niger by authorities there.
Two survived after walking dozens of kilometers
(miles) across the burning desert back to Arlit.
The bodies of 87 of the victims were buried on
Wednesday in accordance with Islamic custom, he
said.
The migrants had set off in two trucks from Arlit
towards Tamanrasset in Algeria sometime between
late September and mid-October, officials and rescue
workers said.
After one truck broke down, the second turned back
to look for help but was stranded and the passengers
tried to return by foot.
“The search is still going on,” the mayor of Arlit,
Maouli Abdouramane, said by telephone.
Many people flee poverty in Niger, ranked by the
United Nations as the least developed country on
earth. Some work in neighbouring Libya and Algeria to
save money before returning home.
The networks which send trucks across the desert
also attract migrants from across West Africa who
dream of a more prosperous life in Europe.
More than 32,000 people have arrived in southern
Europe from Africa so far this year.
A crackdown by Spanish authorities has largely closed
a route from the West African coast to the Canary
Islands which drew tens of thousands of migrants in
the mid-2000s.
Instead, most now try to make the Mediterranean
crossing from north Africa to southern Europe, many
losing their lives when their rickety boats are wrecked.
More than 500 people are believed to have died in two
shipwrecks off southern Italy this month.
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