IOM says at least 139 migrants died and 84 are missing after a boat capsized off Djibouti

The International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN migration agency, said on Sunday that at least 139 migrants have died and 84 people are missing after a boat capsized off Djibouti. The boat was carrying 305 people.

IOM said the toll rose from 109 after the bodies of 30 more people were recovered. The earlier count came from IOM in a separate UN News item in Arabic. It gave at least 109 dead, including 15 children, and more than 116 missing. The later report gives 84 missing. The sources do not explain why the missing figure changed.

According to UN News, the boat was heading from Djibouti towards Yemen when it went down near Guehere, north of Obock, in the early hours of Friday. The earlier item, citing survivors, puts the sinking overnight. About 82 people survived. The earlier IOM count said more than 80 survived, all of them Ethiopian nationals, and that IOM was helping 64 survivors at its Migrant Response Centre in Obock. IOM described the sinking as one of the deadliest shipwrecks recorded on the Eastern Route, which runs from the Horn of Africa to the Arabian Peninsula.

Of the 109 bodies counted in the earlier report, IOM said 52 were men, 42 were women and 15 were children. The sources give no such breakdown for the 139 dead. The UN Resident Coordinator in Djibouti, Jose Barahona, said he was deeply saddened by the loss of at least 139 lives, among them children. The sources do not state the cause of the capsizing.

Djiboutian authorities are continuing search and recovery operations. IOM said the authorities were also giving medical care to survivors and arranging proper burials for the dead. IOM is providing healthcare, psychosocial support, food, shelter and protection services to survivors at its centre in Obock.

IOM gave figures on wider movement through the country. Since 10 September, its Displacement Tracking Matrix has recorded more than 20,000 movements into Djibouti from Ethiopia. IOM said migrants keep heading for the Gulf despite the return to full-scale fighting in Yemen. Over roughly the same period, more than 3,700 refugees have arrived from Yemen, and 539 Ethiopian migrants have come back from there.

Alexandre Coissac, IOM’s chief of mission in Djibouti, told journalists in Geneva on 6 October that the country was facing “overlapping emergencies”. He said migrants were increasingly stranded, with more than 3,000 seen along routes in Djibouti between 20 and 30 September, often without access to basic services. In the earlier item, IOM also said migrants who reach Yemen face violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, exploitation and human trafficking.

IOM Director General Amy Pope said “No one gets into a boat like that unless they believe there is no other safe way”. She added: “We cannot keep treating these deaths as normal. Safe and legal pathways save lives. I am asking governments and donors to act before the next boat goes down.”

The UN is a party to this story. IOM is a UN agency, and it both counted the dead and is running the aid response in Obock. The count of dead and missing is IOM’s. This paper cannot check it.