In the early evening of November 11, after four days at sea, the passengers of two boats carrying 75 Somali migrants spotted distant lights and a hill. They could hear the muezzin calling for the Maghreb, Muslim evening prayers. Their destination, Mayotte, a French island in the Indian Ocean, was finally in sight.
The lead skipper confirmed what they saw and heard — they were close to shore. However, he expressed a concern. He said he feared that gangsters on the beach might attack them. He decided to stop the boats and informed the passengers they would spend the night at sea and go ashore in the morning, according to a Swahili-speaking migrant who served as the interpreter.
Little did the migrants know their journey, so close to a successful ending, was about to descend into unspeakable horror.
The skippers, who were also human traffickers, had been with the passengers since November 7, when they set off in the two boats from a mothership anchored off Kenya’s southern coast, near Mombasa.
The skippers’ role was to take Somalis on the final leg of their journey to Mayotte, the French island off the northwest coast of Madagascar that has recently become a magnet for asylum seekers hoping to reach Europe.
However, the skippers were not happy with their compensation. The smuggler told the interpreter that he had been contracted to transport 40 people, but now there were 75. “The money I was given is not enough,” he complained, according to boat passenger Luul Osman Mohamed, who overheard the conversation. The smuggler wanted the passengers to hand over more.
Soon after, the smuggler briefly turned the boat’s engine on, revved it in the water, and then shut it off again, perhaps as a tease or a warning to the passengers. The other boat did the same.
“Sometimes they moved farther out to sea, and other times they came closer to shore,” Luul told VOA’s Horn of Africa Service. But after two rounds of this, she said, “the engine on the other second boat broke down. Then, our engine failed too.”
That night, the migrants and the two smugglers spent the night adrift on the two boats, just off the coast.
One boat carried 37 people, mostly women and two children — a 2-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl — while the second boat carried 38 passengers.
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This story originated in VOA’s Horn of Africa Service.
