Sudan Officials Seek EU Help on Trafficking
Sudanese officials in a region bordering Eritrea told European diplomats Wednesday that they need help to combat human trafficking, an issue highlighted when hundreds of Eritrean migrants died off Italy.
"We are confronted by organised (criminal) groups," the governor of Kassala state, Mohammed Yousef Adam, told European Union ambassadors visiting from Khartoum.
"And we need your help on this."
Kassala state borders authoritarian Eritrea, from which many thousands of people have fled.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) says on its website that 1,800 refugees and asylum-seekers who arrive each month in eastern Sudan "brave often violent traffickers, smugglers and kidnappers".
More than 350 migrants, mainly from Eritrea, died in an early October shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa as they tried to reach Europe.
Source: Agence France Presse
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