Senegalese President Bassirou Diomaye Faye announced on Wednesday the creation of a free telephone line or green number for citizens to inform the authorities about possible departures by cayuco to the Canary Islands and to denounce their organizers. Faye announced this measure during a visit to Mbour, the town where the shipwreck of a boat last Sunday has resulted in at least 40 dead and about 40 missing. The search for more dead continues. The organizer of this trip, a 52-year-old fisherman who turned himself in to the police, is the brother of the mayor’s father and took four of his children and twelve nephews on board, as explained by the first mayor, Cheikh Issa Sall, in an interview with local television TFM.
Although this is not the first time that a migrant shipwreck has occurred in Senegalese waters and despite not being the most serious in recent years, the Mbour shipwreck, in which most of the deceased were young people from this fishing town, has provoked an unprecedented reaction in Senegal. For the first time, the country’s president has travelled to the scene of the accident to offer his condolences to the affected families. There, Faye, who has been in office for just five months, announced a “relentless pursuit” of the organisers of these trips, whom he described as “sellers of illusions and death who exploit the hopelessness of this youth”.
Faye said that in the last month the security forces had managed to prevent the departure of 690 young people to the Canary Islands in a large operation called Jokko and that they will continue to work “tirelessly.” Despite this, he acknowledged the need to count on citizen collaboration. “In the next few days the Government will put in place a green number because there can be no escapes in the conditions in which these people are throwing themselves into the sea without anyone knowing anything. These people must not remain silent, because if they do, hundreds of young people will die and it is these young people who must rebuild the country. The police forces are doing an outstanding job. They will intensify it, but the population must cooperate when this green number is put in place,” said Faye.
The Senegalese president also called on families not to pressure young people into taking the path of illegal immigration. “The government is working hard to implement appropriate public policies that provide work for young people here in Senegal and invite them to rebuild our country,” insisted Faye, who asked the population to be patient so that the project that led him to electoral victory last March can begin to bear fruit. “It is up to all of us here, men and women, young and old, leaders and citizens, to get involved in a project to build this country and believe in hope, to believe in the possibility of changing the face of our country by ourselves and for ourselves,” he concluded.
On the other hand, little by little the details of the shipwreck are becoming known. “The captain of the cayuco and organizer of the trip is well known in Mbour, where everyone calls him by the nickname of Saff“The captain of the boat was killed,” said Mohamed Diop, a local resident. He is Cheikh Sall, a 52-year-old fisherman and half-brother of the mayor, Cheikh Issa Sall, who told the media during the ceremony held on Wednesday in the presence of the president that around twenty members of his family were on board the boat. “This shows that the captain had no bad intentions. No one in the world would put their sons-in-law, daughters-in-law and brothers on a boat to kill them,” said the mayor.
In an interview with local television TFM, Cheikh Issa Sall explained that his half-brother was doing well in life. “He had his first pirogue in 1998 and fished between Senegal and Guinea-Bissau with materials costing millions of CFA francs (thousands of euros). He built his own house and sold fish as far away as Yarakh. I don’t understand why he felt the need to emigrate with his children and 12 of our nephews,” he lamented. Two of the sons of the organiser of the trip are among the survivors and two others died in the shipwreck. “Most of those on the pirogue were from our family, I have nephews and sons-in-law who died. In Mbour Téfess we are all relatives,” he added.
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The organizer of the trip, who turned himself in to the authorities last Monday after surviving the shipwreck and learning that the police were looking for him, said in his statement that he had charged between 300 and 600 euros to the young people who went on board, except for his family members, a total of 88 according to his words although it could be more according to the testimonies of the survivors. Police sources say that with that money he bought an outboard motor, 3,000 euros of fuel and bags of rice and food for the trip. The person who sold the gasoline to Saff has also been arrested.
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