At least 29 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa have drowned in three shipwrecks off the coast of Tunisia, the latest in a series of similar accidents that have killed illegal migrants trying to reach Europe by crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Tunisia’s coast guard announced it had recovered 29 bodies and “rescued 11 illegal migrants of several African nationalities after their boats crashed,” AFP reported on Sunday, citing Agerpres.

Tunisia, an African country less than 150 kilometers from the Italian island of Lampedusa, where another 3,000 migrants landed this weekend alone, is one of the transit countries for African migrants trying to reach the EU via the Mediterranean route.

More than 21,000 migrants from sub-Saharan Africa are currently in Tunisia, whose president Kais Syed has drawn protests from the EU and the UN after saying “hordes” of illegal migrants have become a source of “violence and crime”. their presence in Tunisia is part of a “criminal act” aimed at changing the demographic composition of his country.

However, French President Emmanuel Macron and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Maloni on Friday asked for international support for Tunisia, a country facing a serious financial crisis. European officials fear that Tunisia could become, after Libya, the new turning point for clandestine migration from Africa to Europe.

The head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, thus warned that the situation in Tunisia has become “very dangerous”, he also mentioned the risk of “collapse” of this state, a situation that could “cause migration flows to the EU and lead to instability in the African region of the North and of the Middle East”.

Tunisia is already a country of origin, and not only of transit, of clandestine migration to Europe. Of the roughly 32,000 migrants who arrived in Italy last year from Tunisia, roughly 18,000 were actually Tunisian citizens, according to official government figures in Rome.