The drama occurred off the coast of Tunisia’s Sfax region, where a front man for the court in charge of the investigation said the dead were from two sunken migrant boats.
Three
The coastguard, in an earlier statement on Facebook, said its personnel had rescued 54 people "of various sub-Saharan African nationalities", and recovered 14 bodies but mentioned only one boat.
The agency said it had prevented a total of 14 attempts to cross the sea and rescued 435
Many black
The North African country hosts around 21,000 undocumented
Hundreds, including children and pregnant women, were made homeless in the winter cold and many registered with their embassies for repatriation, mostly to West African countries.
Others have sought to reach Europa
...the land mass occupying the space between the English Channel and the Urals, also known as Moslem Lebensraum...in unseaworthy boats from Tunisia, whose coast lies about 130 kilometres from the Italian island of Lampedusa at its closest point.
The country has long been a springboard for people fleeing war and poverty elsewhere on the continent to seek better lives in Europe, along with thousands of Tunisians themselves.
Rome said in February that more than 32,000