At least 25 people died between the Comoros archipelago and the French island of Mayotte. “after the deliberate sinking of his boat caused by traffickers off the coast of the Comoros Islands, between Anjouan and Mayotte, during the night from Friday to Saturday.”announced in a press release the International Organization for Migration (IOM) in East and the Horn of Africa, on Monday, November 4.
About thirty people were traveling on the boat, including seven women, two children aged six and two, as well as two babies, according to the stories of the five survivors. The latter were rescued by fishermen on Saturday morning.
Two other deadly kwassa-kwassa shipwrecks, the name for Comorian canoes, have occurred in the last three months in the same area, where the Comoros and Mayotte are just 70 kilometers apart.
Between 7,000 and 10,000 deaths between 1995 and 2012
In September, a ship with twelve people on board never arrived in Mayotte after leaving Anjouan. A month earlier, in August, eight people died in similar circumstances. The arm of sea that separates the Comoros archipelago from Mayotte, which became a French department in 2011, is a particularly deadly migratory route.
A year after the incorporation of Mayotte into the French departments, a Senate report estimated that between 1995 and 2012 between 7,000 and 10,000 people had died during an attempted crossing.
Almost half of Mayotte’s population was foreigners, according to the latest figures from the French national statistics institute from 2017. Of these 123,000 people, 95% were Comorians.
