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NIAMEY – Dozens of migrants from Niger, most of them women and children, died of thirst in the Sahara desert earlier this month after their vehicle broke down, officials said Monday.
One survivor recalled how a man watched his wife and nine children die, and said the migrants, who were headed for Algeria, had been packed “like cattle” into overcrowded vehicles.
“Thirst was the main cause of the deaths of our wives and children,” Sadafiou told the Sahara FM radio station, adding that “hunger and the travelling conditions also took their toll”.
Rhissa Feltou, the mayor of the main northern town of Agadez, told AFP that two vehicles were carrying at least 60 migrants when one broke down, and they were all left behind in the desert while the remaining vehicle was driven off.
“About 40 Nigeriens, including numerous children and women, who were attempting to emigrate to Algeria, died of thirst in mid-October,” he said.
“Many others have been reported missing since their vehicle broke down in the desert.”
Niger is one of the world’s poorest countries and has been hit by successive food crises.
The UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimates that at least 30,000 economic migrants passed through Agadez between March and August of this year.
The army found the bodies of two women and three adolescents, a paramilitary policeman told AFP. No other bodies have so far turned up.
“Travellers told us that they saw and counted up to 35 bodies, mostly those of women and children, by the road,” said Abdourahmane Maouli, the mayor of the northern uranium mining town of Arlit.
According to Feltou, two vehicles left Arlit with at least 60 passengers “around October 15”, heading for Tamanrassett, an Algerian town in the heart of the Sahara.
When one vehicle broke down, the other drove on empty, leaving the passengers behind in a plan to find spare parts and bring them back for repairs, the mayor of Agadez said.
The migrants, short of water, dispersed in small groups in search of an oasis, Feltou said. After days of walking, five survivors reached Arlit and alerted the army, “who arrived too late at the scene”.
A survivor told Niger’s bimonthly Air Info that 82 people had perished, in a further conflicting report on the death toll.
Fatou N’Diaye of the International Organization for Migration in Niger said that 78 people were in the two vehicles heading for Algeria, and that 13 survivors had passed through the organisation’s transit centre in Arlit.
“Like all the migrants we welcome, they were worn out and feeling very ill” upon arrival, she said.
In the lucrative business of transporting Africans fleeing conditions at home for what they hope will be a better life elsewhere, traffickers quite frequently abandon their human cargo in the desert, leaving them to near certain death.
Azaoua Mamane, who works for the non-governmental organisation Synergie in Arlit, said the group left behind consisted of “entire families, including many children and women, who departed for Algeria, where they hoped to beg for their keep”.
Libya, rather than Algeria, is more frequently the favoured country of transit for west Africans making the journey across the continent.
These migrants often look to Europe as their final destination, a security source told AFP, and use Libya as a jumping off point amid the relative chaos in the North African country since the fall of Moamer Kadhafi in 2011.
Humanitarian agencies say nearly 20,000 migrants have perished while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea into Europe over the past 20 years.
The death of more than 300 Africans in a shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa earlier this month has recently pushed the issue to the top of Europe’s political agenda. – AFP.
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