Photo credit: Dhaka Tribune
At least 39 people are reported to have died when a migrant boat sank off the coast of Yemen, the UN immigration agency has reported.
The International Agency reports that 150 others were missing, but 71 people survived.
The nationalities of the migrants were not clear.
Many migrants from the Horn of Africa set off across the Red Sea annually to reach the oil-rich Gulf to escape conflict, natural disasters or poor economic prospects.
The IOM said at the time it had recorded a total of 1,350 deaths on the migration route since 2014, not including this year. In 2023 alone, it said it documented at least 698 deaths on the road, including 105 lost at sea.
The migrants who eventually reach Yemen often encounter further threats to their safety. The Arabian Peninsula’s poorest country has been engaged in a civil war for a decade.
Many are trying to reach Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries where they can work as labourers or domestic workers. However, in August, Human Rights Watch accused Saudi border guards of killing hundreds of Ethiopians trying to cross into the Gulf kingdom from Yemen between March 2022 and June 2023. They were alleged to have used explosive weapons in some cases. But the Saudi government dismissed the group’s allegations as “unfounded and not based on reliable sources.”
