DAKAR, Senegal — Nearly 100 African migrants hoping to escape crushing poverty met a grisly end in the desert, officials said Thursday, dying of thirst under the baking sun after their two trucks broke down in the middle of the Sahara before reaching Algeria.
It took weeks for authorities to learn of the tragedy and for recovery teams to reach the distant site, where they found a gruesome scene including the remains of 52 children and 33 women.
“It was horrific. We found badly decomposing bodies and others that had been eaten by jackals,” said Almoustapha Alhacen, the head of a nonprofit organization in northern Niger that helped bury the bodies and who was at the site Wednesday. “We found the bodies of small children who were huddled beside their dead mothers.”
The victims were spread out across a 12-mile radius, suggesting they had set off on foot but failed to head toward the Algerian border 6 miles away, he added.
The migrants in Niger had begun their journey late last month in two trucks and were being smuggled along a well-established trafficking route to neighboring Algeria, said Col. Garba Makido, the governor of Niger’s Agadez province, south of where the bodies were found. From Algeria, many continue on in hopes of crossing from North Africa to southern Europe. It was not clear why so many women and children were among the victims.
Officials were alerted to the migrant deaths only when a lone woman managed to stumble out of the desert into the Nigerian town of Arlit this month.
The next day, a father walking with his two young daughters also arrived. But his children died of thirst just a few miles outside Arlit, Makido said. A total of 92 people died and 21 survived, most of whom made their way to towns at the Algerian border.
