Photo credit: BBC
Fathi Hussein, a beauty salon owner, died at sea after a deal she struck with migrant smugglers to take her to the French island of Mayette went wrong.
Yahoo! News reports that the 26-year-old Somali’s stepsister Samira told the BBC that, “We were told by survivors that she died from hunger.”
The family learned from them that Fathi died in one of two small boats adrift in the Indian Ocean for about two weeks after being abandoned by smugglers.
Samira told BBC, “People were eating raw fish and drinking seawater, which refused. They (the survivors) said she started hallucinating before she died. And after that they threw her body into the ocean.”
Her family learned of her death from fellow Somalis who had been rescued by fishermen off the coast of Madagascar about a week ago.
The International Organization for Migration said that over 70 people were on the two boats when they capsized, claiming the lives of twenty-four, while forty-eight survived.
Hundreds of migrants are believed to die each year trying to make it to the tiny French island, located about 300km northwest of Madagascar.
Fathia flew from Mogadishu to Mombasa on November 1. She later left by boat for Mayotte – a perilous journey of more than 1,100 km across the Indian Ocean.
Fathi had a successful business in Mogadishu and lived in the middle-class neighbourhood of Yaqshid. She hid her plan from the family, with the exception of her younger sister, to whom she said she had paid smugglers money she had made running her beauty salon.
“She used to hate the ocean; I don’t know why and how she took that decision. I wish I could give her a hug,” Samira said.
