Tunisia coast guard recovers eight bodies of migrants whose boat sank

TUNIS, Aug 23 (Reuters) – Tunisian coast guard forces recovered the bodies of eight Tunisian migrants whose boat sank at the weekend en route to Italy, while the search continued for six others still missing, a National Guard spokesperson said on Sunday.

Coast guard, military and civil protection teams, backed by two helicopters, continued to search for the missing migrants.

The boat, which set off early on Thursday with 15 mostly young people on board, sank off the Tunisian coast this weekend, and so far only one person had been rescued, the head of a migrant rights group said on Saturday.

Among those on board were seven members of the same family and a man with his pregnant wife, the head of the Tunisian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters.

The sole survivor said he had been adrift at sea for 48 hours before being rescued by a commercial vessel.

All of the migrants were from the Ben Guerdane area in southeastern Tunisia, and dozens of young people gathered late on Saturday in the town near the Libyan border to demand that search operations be accelerated.

Police fired tear gas to disperse the protesters.

The central Mediterranean route from the North African coast is one of the world’s deadliest migration routes, used by migrants from Africa and the Middle East seeking to reach Europe, often in overcrowded or unseaworthy boats.

(Reporting By Tarek Amara; Editing by Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Tomasz Janowski)

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