The Mediterranea Saving Humans NGO has said it was contacted by a man part of a large group of migrants abandoned along Tunisia's western border.
The founder and chaplain of the Mediterranea Saving Humans NGO, Luca Casarini and Don Mattia Ferrari, said they were contacted by a man along Tunisia's western border, where he and his travel companions were abandoned in the desert.
"He managed to send up the GPS location of the place where they were left," Mediterranea Saving Humans said in a statement.
"The people were abandoned along Tunisia's western border, in inaccessible and isolated areas in the Haidra and Djebel Ghorra areas, without any form of subsistence a few kilometers from the Algerian border."
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'Confirmation of 16-17 March deportation from Sfax'
The NGO said that it has been unable to contact the man after the message. "Through our solidarity networks in Tunisia, such as Refugees in Tunisia," the NGO said, "we were able to get confirmation of a large pushback and deportation from the Sfax port after operations conducted between March 16 and 17 for the recovery at sea of people who had been trying to reach Italy."
It added that "the operation conducted by the Tunisian Garde Nationale and interior ministry forces used 11 buses to take the refugees and survivors after they had been searched and after their telephones, water, and basic essentials had been confiscated."
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'Procedure consolidated after EU-Tunisia deal'
"This procedure has become consolidated after agreements between the European Union and Tunisia following pressure from the Italian government: migrants captured at sea while trying to reach Italy and Europe are taken back to land and then deported," the NGO said.
"In the past few months, we have received calls multiple times from groups of people who had been deported. We often lost all trace of them" afterwards, Casarini and Ferrari said.
"The desert and uninhabited areas along the border have become an enormous cemetery, like the sea," they said.
"We are calling on the authorities and anyone else who has the possibility to intervene to rescue the women, men, and children that have been deported in this massive deportation."
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