Tunisian coast guard forces recovered the bodies of eight Tunisian migrants whose boat sank \u200bat the weekend en route to Italy, while \u200cthe search continued for six others still missing, a National Guard Spokesperson said on Sunday.<\/p>\n
Coast guard, military and civil protection teams, backed \u200bby two helicopters, continued to search for the \u200bmissing migrants.<\/p>\n
The boat, which set off early on \u2060Thursday with 15 mostly young people on board, sank \u200boff the Tunisian coast this weekend, and so far only \u200bone person had been rescued, the head of a migrant rights group said on Saturday.<\/p>\n
Among those on board were seven members of \u200bthe same family and a man with his pregnant \u200bwife, the head of the Tunisian Observatory for Human Rights told Reuters.<\/em><\/p>\n The \u200csole \u2060survivor said he had been adrift at sea for 48 hours before being rescued by a commercial vessel.<\/p>\n All of the migrants were from the Ben Guerdane area in \u200bsoutheastern Tunisia, and \u200bdozens of \u2060young people gathered late on Saturday in the town near the Libyan border to \u200bdemand that search operations be accelerated.<\/p>\n Police fired tear \u200bgas \u2060to disperse the protesters.<\/p>\n The central Mediterranean route from the North African coast is one of the world’s deadliest migration routes, \u2060used \u200bby migrants from Africa and the \u200bMiddle East seeking to reach Europe, often in overcrowded or unseaworthy boats.<\/p>\n –Reuters–<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":42252,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false},"news-type":[78,26],"class_list":["post-43559","news","type-news","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","news-type-featured","news-type-general_news","entry"],"acf":{"short_description":"The \u200csole \u2060survivor said he had been adrift at sea for 48 hours before being rescued by a commercial vessel.","published_date":"","news_description":"The \u200csole \u2060survivor said he had been adrift at sea for 48 hours before being rescued by a commercial vessel.","form_embed":"","author":"","image_caption":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/43559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/43559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43561,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/43559\/revisions\/43561"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42252"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.channelafrica.co.za\/channelafrica\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-type?post=43559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}