Eleven bodies recovered after boat carrying migrants sinks off Tunisia

A boat carrying 15 mostly young Tunisian migrants sank off the Tunisian coast on its way to Italy. Eleven bodies have been recovered by Tunisia's coastguard, with three others still unaccounted for, according to the National Guard. Only one person was rescued alive, and they had been adrift at sea for 48 hours before being rescued by a commercial vessel.

The boat had set off early on Thursday and sank over the weekend. Among those on board were seven members of the same family and a man with his pregnant wife, according to the head of the Tunisian Observatory for Human Rights, as reported by MyJoyOnline Ghana and SABC News. All of the migrants were from the Ben Guerdane area in southeastern Tunisia.

Dozens of young people gathered in the town near the Libyan border to demand that search operations be accelerated, and police fired tear gas to disperse the protesters. The central Mediterranean route from the North African coast is one of the world's deadliest migration routes. According to Al-Monitor, coastguard, military and civil protection teams, backed by two helicopters, continued to search for the missing. MyJoyOnline Ghana reported that eight bodies were recovered, while SABC News and Al-Monitor reported eleven.

Brief written by urgent.news from Al-Monitor, MyJoyOnline Ghana, SABC News — 3 reports on this story. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.