More than 100 Ethiopian refugees are missing after the boat they were sailing on to Yemen sank when it collided with another vessel in Somali territorial waters on March 20, a United Nations official said on Wednesday.
”Nearly 110 Ethiopian refugees are missing after the sinking on March 20 of their Ethiopian boat in a collision with a Somali boat,” said Mohammed Aref, representative of the UN High Commission for Refugees in Aden.
”The boat sank with 120 refugees aboard. Only 13 people, the majority of them crew members, were saved,” he added, citing accounts by two crew members among the survivors who arrived in Yemen.
Residents in Somalia’s northeast state of Puntland said on Tuesday that at least 100 people were feared dead in an accident in the Gulf of Aden last week involving a boat sailing from a fishing village in Puntland to Yemen.
”Most of the people who died were Somalis, but some of them were also Ethiopians, who were going to Yemen, from where they could cross to Saudi Arabia,” said Hassan Farah, a resident of Mareirey village near Bosasso, the regional capital of Puntland.
Mareirey shopowner Ismail Yasin said the people who travelled on the ill-fated boat had been waiting for the trip to Yemen for the past three weeks.
Thousands of Somalis fleeing poverty and violence in their country since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in 1991 have died on the sea route to Yemen.
In January 2003, between 80 and 100 people, most of them Somalis, died after their boat capsized in the Gulf of Aden.
According to local humanitarian sources in the region, there are currently 40 000 Somali refugees in Yemen. — Sapa-AFP