Dozens of migrants killed after boat sinks near Yemen
The vessel, with 154 people onboard, sank in the Gulf of Aden on Sunday, sparking a huge search and rescue operation.
Abdusattor Esoev, the head of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Yemen, said: 'As of last night, 68 people aboard the boat were killed, but only 12 out of 157 have been rescued so far. The fate of the missing is still unknown.'
Mr Esoev said the bodies of 54 people washed ashore in the district of Khanfar, while 14 others were found dead and taken to a hospital morgue in Zinjibar, the provincial capital of Abyan on Yemen's southern coast.
The rest are missing and presumed to have died.
Despite the war that has ravaged Yemen since 2014, the impoverished country has remained a key transit point for irregular migration, in particular from Ethiopia which itself has been roiled by ethnic conflict.
Migrants ready to risk lives on deadly route
Each yeah, thousands brave the so-called 'Eastern Route' from Djibouti to Yemen across the Red Sea, in the hope of eventually reaching oil-rich Gulf countries.
The vessel that sank off the coast of Yemen's Abyan was carrying mostly Ethiopian migrants, according to the province's security directorate.
It said on Sunday that security forces were conducting operations to recover a 'significant' number of bodies.
Hundreds of migrants have died or gone missing in off Yemen in recent months, including in March when two boats holding 180 people sank between Yemen and Djibouti.
Last month, at least eight people died after smugglers had forced migrants to disembark from a boat in the Red Sea, according to the UN's migration agency.
Last year, the IOM recorded at least 558 deaths on the Red Sea route, with 462 resulting from shipwrecks.
The International Organisation for Migration says tens of thousands of migrants have become stranded in Yemen and suffer abuse and exploitation during their journeys.
More than 60,000 migrants arrived in Yemen in 2024, down from 97,200 in 2023, probably because of greater patrolling of the waters, according to an IOM report in March.
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