Over 180 Illegal Immigrant Bodies Piled Up in Tunisian Hospital Amid Rise in Mediterranean Crossings

This comes after the number of corpses recovered or thrown into the sea increased during the days of Eid al-Fitr, when attempts were made to cross the Mediterranean towards Europe from migrants, coinciding with the stabilization of temperatures.

The regional director of health in Sfax, Hatem Al-Sharif, said, in statements to Sky News Arabia, that they are working to overcome the health crisis in the city after the intervention of the central authorities to speed up genetic analyzes and allocate a cemetery for foreign immigrants in Ahwaz.

Al-Sharif considered that the flow of a large number of corpses that were recovered from the Mediterranean during a short period during Eid al-Fitr exceeded the capacity of the forensic medicine department in the hospital, stressing that more than 150 corpses were recovered on the two days of Eid from the beaches of Kerkennah, Louata and Al-Lozeh after they drowned when trying to Stealth sailing towards European shores.

Hatem Al-Sharif confirmed that the Sfax hospital received 30 new bodies on Monday, and expected that among the immigrants who died, there would be Tunisian citizens, which will be confirmed by the results of genetic analyzes.

For his part, the director of the Sfax Hospital, Khaled El Othmani, said that the number of corpses of victims of illegal immigration has exceeded the capacity of the hospital, which is likely to rise according to the news they receive.

This comes as the spokesman for the Tunisian Forum for Economic and Social Rights, an organization working in the field of illegal immigration, Ramadan Benomar, considered that the immigration file in Tunisia has become tragic in the absence of a comprehensive approach by the authorities to stop the bleeding of migration.

Ben Omar said in his interview with the site that the season of improving weather conditions in Tunisia is a time for an exacerbation of the number of victims of clandestine migration at a time when the authorities are unable to set a unified guide to deal with marine calamities that coordinates administrative, security and health efforts to avoid the accumulation of corpses on the coasts or in hospitals because human dignity Absolute priority.

Benomar added that Tunisia is harnessing its weak capabilities for a security approach, preventing migrants from sailing illegally, and neglecting rescue efforts or dealing more effectively with calamities, in order to ensure proper burial of the bodies and provide information for the families of the missing, especially with the difficulty of distinguishing between the nationalities of the victims.

The civil society activist pointed the finger at human trafficking groups that accumulate profits and use more dangerous means in order to benefit financially, while the state plays the role of policeman on the coasts without protecting the victims of marine disasters.

It should be noted that the Naval Guard units in a number of coastal areas announced in a communiqué that they thwarted 49 illegal immigration operations at the end of the week and rescued 921 migrants from drowning, most of them foreigners.

The floating units of the Naval Guards in the center (Sfax, Kerkennah and Mahdia) were also able, during the night between 22 and 23 April, to nullify 39 operations to cross the sea borders by stealth and rescued 773 migrants from drowning, including 761 from sub-Saharan African countries.

In the same period, the Italian authorities announced the arrival of 21 irregular immigration boats to the coasts of Lampedusa, all of which departed from the Tunisian coasts, which suddenly put the island in a state of emergency.
Since the beginning of the year, the Italian authorities have counted more than 30,000 migrants who have arrived on the country’s coasts.

Tunisia has replaced Libya as the main departure point for migrants fleeing economic hardship, drought and conflict in Africa and the Middle East in hopes of a better life in Europe.