TUNIS – Tunisian authorities have arrested 12 people including a smuggler involved in organising a recent crossing that killed 15 migrants after their boat capsized, the coastguard said in a statement yesterday.

On Monday, a boat said to be bearing some 60 migrants capsized off the coast of the southeastern island of Djerba.

The coastguard had given an initial death toll of 12 passengers, all Tunisians and including children and a woman, before later revising it upwards to 15.

Authorities said they rescued 31 people and were still looking for the others.

In its statement,  the coastguard said the main smuggler and his wife were among those arrested, adding that authorities seized three cars, a boat and “large sums of money”.

President Kais Saied, who is seeking a new term in elections Sunday, has ordered the interior ministry to investigate the event, which he called “painful and strange”.

The island of Djerba — heavily policed and crowded with tourists — has rarely been used as a departure point for migrants seeking to reach Europe.

Other areas of Tunisia, as well as neighbouring Libya, have become key launchpads for migrants risking the perilous Mediterranean Sea crossing to Europe.

Also on Monday, the coastguard said it rescued 22 Tunisians, most of them women and children, off the coast of Kerkennah in the east.

The day after, 36 other would-be migrants — Tunisians and Egyptians — were rescued off Bizerte in the north, local media said.

Each year, tens of thousands of people attempt to make the crossing from Tunisia, with Italy — whose Lampedusa island is only 150 kilometres (90 miles) away — often their first port of call.

The International Organisation for Migration has said more than 30,309 migrants have died in the Mediterranean in the past decade, including more than 3,000 last year.

Since 1 January, Tunisian rights group FTDES recorded at least 400 migrant deaths and disappearances in shipwrecks off Tunisia.

More than 1,300 people died or disappeared off the North African country last year, according to the group. – Nampa/AFP