Returned migrants are pictured in a returnee center in Central Addis Ababa. File picture: Zacharias Abubeker/AFP
Cape Town – Ethiopia’s government will investigate the deaths of 27 Ethiopian migrants found dumped near Zambia’s capital, Lusaka.
The state Ethiopia News Agency said its country would send experts to the area to confirm the identities of the citizens who reportedly died while attempting to cross into South Africa illegally.
Zambian police found the bodies of the 27 men on Sunday in Chongwe Ngwerere, a farming area on the outskirts of the capital. They are believed to have suffocated or died from suspected hunger and exhaustion while in transit.
Zambian authorities said that the bodies were believed to be migrants from Ethiopia.
In a statement, the deputy public relations officer for the Zambia Police Service, Danny Mwale, said the individuals were likely to have suffocated or died from suspected hunger and exhaustion while in transit.
Authorities have said preliminary police investigations showed the victims were all men aged between 20 and 38 and had been dumped along a road.
“Members of the public in Lusaka’s Ngwerere area discovered suspected dead bodies around 6am,” a police statement read. “Police officers were alerted and quickly rushed to the scene, where they found one man gasping for life.”
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said in a statement that is profoundly shocked and alarmed by the gruesome discovery of the bodies of 27 Ethiopian migrants that were found abandoned in Chongwe Ngwerere, Zambia.
According to the UN agency for migration, irregular migration along the “Southern Route” is often facilitated by an intricate network of smugglers and traffickers engaging in aggravated smuggling or trafficking as well as aggressive attempts to avoid detection by authorities that put migrants’ lives in danger.
“Aggravated smuggling or trafficking increases migrants’ risks on a route that already includes natural hazards, utilisation of unsafe means of transportation, exploitation and other abuses. Migrants on this route are often subject to detention, violence and even death.”
The UN body says the latest incident highlights the urgent need to address the challenges of irregular migration including through a transnational response to the smuggling of migrants and trafficking in persons along the “Southern Route”, which runs from the Horn of Africa to southern Africa.
The latest incident comes less than two months after the bodies of 30 Ethiopian migrants were discovered in a mass grave in neighbouring Malawi, and two years after 64 Ethiopian men were found dead, asphyxiated, in a sealed shipping container in Mozambique.
IOL