As many as 50 Somali and Ethiopian migrants and refugees drowned off Yemen’s coast after a smuggler threw more than 120 of them overboard from their boat into torrential waters, the United Nations said Wednesday. The staff aided 27 migrants on shore and found 29 shallow graves dug by survivors. With many still unaccounted for, the IOM believes up to 50 may have died. “The survivors told our colleagues on the beach that the smuggler pushed them to the sea, when he saw some ‘authority types’ near the coast,” Laurent de Boeck, the IOM Yemen chief of mission, said in a statement from the U.N. Many of those thrown overboard were children, with the average age of passengers being 16.

Source: Huffington Post August 09, 2017 20:41 UTC