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Somalia bans citizens from traveling to Sudan over immigrant deaths

Xinhua, April 21, 2016 Adjust font size:

Somalia on Wednesday banned its citizens from travelling to Sudan, a popular passage for undocumented immigrants from the Horn of African nation headed for Europe.

The ban came after hundreds of Somali immigrants were drowned in the Mediterranean Sea earlier this week.

Head of Somali Immigration and Naturalization Department, Gen. Abdullahi Gafow Mohamud told reporters in Mogadishu that Somali citizens who are having visas to travel to Sudan will be impacted by this temporary ban.

"We have suspended the travelling documents of our citizens going to Sudan temporarily because of the national disaster happened on our youths travelling to Italy in the Mediterranean Sea. No ordinary Somali is allowed to travel to Sudan except on diplomatic missions," Mohamud told journalists.

"Such incident has never happened before, therefore, we are going to solve this problem. The suspension will remain until the government reaches final decision on this issue," he added.

The Somalis died on Sunday when their boat capsized en route to Italy from Egypt. The UNHCR said Wednesday its team interviewed survivors of what could be one of the worst tragedies involving refugees and migrants in the last 12 months.

If confirmed, as many as 500 people may have lost their lives when a large ship went down in the Mediterranean Sea at an unknown location between Libya and Italy.

The 41 survivors, 37 men, three women and a three-year-old child, were rescued by a merchant ship and taken to Kalamata, in the Peloponnese peninsula of Greece on April 16.

"Those rescued include 23 Somalis, 11 Ethiopians, 6 Egyptians and a Sudanese. The survivors told us that they had been part of a group of between 100 and 200 people who departed last week from a locality near Tobruk in Libya on a 30-metre-long boat," UNHCR said in a statement.

"After sailing for several hours, the smugglers in charge of the boat attempted to transfer the passengers to a larger ship carrying hundreds of people in terribly overcrowded conditions. At one point during the transfer, the larger boat capsized and sank," the statement said. Enditem