Children, infants missing after Tunis police clear makeshift refugee camps
Al Jazeera
Police cleared two of the Tunisian capital’s irregular Black migrant camps, busing residents to an unknown location.
Tunis, Tunisia – Hundreds of refugees and migrants camped in the centre of Tunis have disappeared, with reports suggesting that the group, including several infants, had been abandoned in the desert near Algeria.
According to local media reports, security forces swept into the encampments in the prosperous Berge de Lac business district early on Friday, rounding up men, women and children and destroying the shelters they had built.
One encampment was in a walled-off public park and the other was in an alleyway outside the United Nations’s International Organization for Migration (IOM).
A sit-in was being held by roughly 100 other refugees, principally from Sudan, outside the UNHCR’s offices, 6.6km (four miles) away.
Several infants born in Tunisia to refugee or migrant mothers were present when Al Jazeera visited the IOM camp on Tuesday.
