TUNIS: Tunisian authorities have arrested an Italian man suspected of building a boat for irregular migrants trying to reach to Europe, a judicial source told AFP on Wednesday.
The 45-year-old who was not named “works in a boat building factory,” Farid Jha, spokesman for the public prosecutor’s office in Monastir, a coastal city in east-central Tunisia, told AFP.
He was arrested Tuesday after authorities intercepted a boat which he built from plastic resin that had been used in a bid by migrants to cross the Mediterranean for Europe, said Jha.
Three Tunisians who helped plan the crossing were also arrested, he said, adding that another suspect was still on the run.
Each year, tens of thousands of people set off by boat from Tunisia and neighboring Libya for Europe, with Italy their first port of call.
It is the first time a European citizen is arrested in Tunisia in connection with such irregular migration crossings.
Building illegal makeshift boats usually involves networks of local Tunisians and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
Sfax, Tunisia’s second largest city and a key departure point, is a hotspot for building makeshift boats, which often lead to shipwrecks and migrants dead or missing.
Since January 1, at least 103 makeshift boats have capsized and 341 bodies, including of 336 foreigners, have been recovered off Tunisia’s coast, according to the interior ministry.
More than 1,300 people died or disappeared last year in shipwrecks off the North African country, according to the Tunisian FTDES rights group.
The International Organization for Migration has said more than 27,000 migrants have died in the Mediterranean in the past decade, including more than 3,000 last year.