The bodies of 16 migrants and refugees have been recovered by the Tunisian coast guard off the country's eastern coast, the National Guard says, in the latest migrant boat disaster in the Mediterranean.
“The bodies were found over the weekend and on Monday… The victims have not been identified because the bodies had decomposed,” a senior National Guard official, Houssem Eddine Jebabli, told the Reuters news agency.
Samples have been taken to identify the bodies “due to the degree of decomposition,” said Farid Ben Jha, spokesman for the public prosecutor's office for the governorates of Monastir and Mahdia.
He said the bodies were found in three different areas in Mahdia, one of Tunisia's irregular migration hotspots.
Tunisia and neighboring Libya have become key departure points for migrants and refugees, often from other African countries, who risk dangerous journeys across the Mediterranean in the hope of a better life in Europe.
Italy, whose island of Lampedusa is just 150 kilometers (90 miles) from Tunisia, is usually its first port of call. Every year, tens of thousands of people try to cross.
Last month, at least 15 Tunisians died, including three babies, and another 10 went missing after their boat sank off the Tunisian coast in Djerba as they attempted to cross the Mediterranean to Europe. At least 29 other people were rescued.
The bodies of 13 migrants and refugees from sub-Saharan Africa were also recovered in the same area last month.
Since January 1 of this year, at least 103 improvised boats have capsized and 341 bodies have been recovered off the coast of Tunisia, according to the Ministry of Inside.
More than 1,300 people died or went missing last year in shipwrecks off the North African country, according to the Tunisian human rights group FTDES.
The International Organization for Migration has said more than 30,309 migrants and refugees have died in the Mediterranean in the last decade, including more than 3,000 last year across the vast sea.
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