TUNIS —
Tunisia said Wednesday it plans to repatriate a four-year-old girl who reached
Italy aboard a boat with other irregular migrants, but without her family.
اضافة اعلان
The state “is
taking care of the girl’s interests and completing the necessary measures to
ensure her return to the country as soon as possible,” the Tunisian family
ministry said.
A Tunisian
delegation is scheduled to meet on Friday with the Italian judge overseeing the
case in Sicily.
The girl’s
parents had planned to leave as a family along with her brother, aged seven, on
a makeshift boat from the coastal town of Sayada and head towards the Italian island
of Lampedusa.
But according to
the
FTDES rights group, which closely tracks clandestine migration from
Tunisia, the father had “handed his daughter over to the smuggler on the boat”
before retracing his steps from the embarkation point “to help his wife and son
who were far behind”.
“In the
meantime, the boat left for Lampedusa,” it said.
Her parents,
street vendors in coastal Tunisia, were detained last week before being
released, a court official in the city of Monastir told AFP.
They had paid
nearly 24,000 Tunisian dinars (about $7,400) to attempt the crossing, the FTDES
group and the interior ministry said.
The owner of the
boat and other migrants have also been detained, the court official said.
A deep economic
crisis is pushing growing numbers of Tunisians to attempt to reach Europe,
particularly Lampedusa which is less than 130km off the coast.
Authorities in the
North African country of 12 million, under pressure from Europe to stem the flow, are
struggling to intercept those who leave.
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