Zambia police Sunday found the bodies of 27 men, believed to be migrants from Ethiopia, dumped in a farming area on the outskirts of the capital after they died from suspected hunger and exhaustion, authorities said.
A sole survivor was found alive in the early hours of Sunday morning and rushed to a Lusaka hospital for treatment, while the dead were transported to the mortuary for identification and postmortems to determine the exact cause of death, police said.
Preliminary police investigations showed the victims were all males aged between 20 and 38 and had been dumped along a road by unknown people.
“Police and other security wings have since instituted investigations into the matter,” Danny Mwale, police spokesman, said in a statement after police were alerted to the gruesome scene by members of the public.
Ethiopian migrants often use Zambia when travelling to countries such as South Africa, though reports of deaths in transit there are rare.
The AU has failed citizens of its member states. What’s the use of having an organization that can’t address even the basic needs of its people? The Horn of Africa has been a trouble spot for some time now. It began with Somalia which has been a failed State. Then Eritrea and Ethiopia. The number of illegal immigrants from Ethiopia is an indication that things aren’t ok in that country. We can’t continue to pretend while the region continues to report such cases. Recently it was in Malawi were people from the same region were reportedly dead in similar manner. South Africa is on the verge, it can’t take any more foreigners. Our leaders shouldn’t wait until the situation explodes. What’s their conscience when they get reports of people dying in such a manner?
Criminality under upnd.
We should be charging SA for this ..these people are going there!!
When people start to manipulate their own constitutions through creation of third term when the constitution is clear on what a term is, they heard the way of the African troubled countries. That is the first introduction of trouble in a country.
We must not forgot. We must always protect our country from such people like we did in Zambia.
Great Zambians. Keep it up and protect the constitution of Zambia amicably.
This is very sad indeed.
People smuggling and human trafficking is on the rise. Those people probably suffocated due to lack of oxygen in the compact space where they were hiding and hence died. After discovering the deaths the transporter could not go to the police and implicate himself so just decided to dump the bodies and be on his way with the money he was paid to transport them.