The Niger authorities on Monday rescued 72 illegal migrants
stranded in the scorching Sahara desert after their truck got a flat tyre.
The people who found them were on their way to the burial site for
some of the 92 migrants who died of thirst after a similar incident last month.
"They were spotted in the middle of the desert by a
delegation from Agadez that was on its way to the graves of the migrants who
died recently," Azaoua Mamane, from the Niger-based aid group Synergie,
told AFP.
A local security official confirmed the rescue but provided no
details.
Mamane said the group, mostly women and children under the age of
10, were on their way back from Algeria.
Upon hearing of last month's tragedy, in which 92 migrants
perished stranded in the desert when their truck broke down, they had decided
to leave their life of begging in southern Algeria and return home.
One of the group's rescued women, Baraka Souley, said the
migrants, from southern Niger, "were voluntarily returning to their
homeland after those horrible deaths".
She said their truck, which had left from the main southern
Algerian town of Tamanrasset, burst a tyre in the desert, causing a panic among
the migrants.
They were eventually driven back on Monday to Arlit, the last town
in northern Niger before the border with Algeria, in vehicles sent by the
governor of nearby Agadez.
Agadez, the main city in northern Niger, is a major transit point
for migrants hoping to eke out a living as beggars in southern Algeria and
others heading to Libya and planning to cross the Mediterranean to Europe.
The UN's Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs
estimates that at least 30 000 economic migrants passed through Agadez between
March and August of this year.
The authorities in the impoverished landlocked west African
country announced the arrest of dozens of migrants attempting to cross the
desert into Algeria at the weekend.
The governor of Agadez promised to crack down on smuggling
networks in the region.
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