As Pakistanis die in fresh Mediterranean tragedy, a question lingers: Why?

Rehan Aslam’s family ran a transport and car rental business, and grocery stores. Rehan helped run those businesses.

But five months ago, the 34-year-old sold his car, a Toyota Hiace wagon, for 4.5 million rupees ($16,000) to pay an agent who would help him leave behind his life in his village, Jora, in Gujrat district of Pakistan’s Punjab province, in search of a future in Europe.

He never made it.

Rehan, a father of two girls and a boy, was among 86 people who boarded a passenger boat on January 2 near Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania in West Africa, aiming for the Canary Islands, an archipelago off the coast of northwestern Africa controlled by Spain.

Stranded at sea for more than 13 days, the vessel was eventually rescued by Moroccan authorities – with only 36 survivors on board. Rabia Kasuri, Pakistan’s acting ambassador to Morocco, confirmed that at least 65 Pakistanis were on board the boat: of them, 43 were dead, while 22 survived.

Rehan was among those who died.

“He just wanted to get to Europe somehow. That was his dream, and he told us not to create any obstacles in his way,” Mian Ikram Aslam, Rehan’s elder brother, told Al Jazeera. “All he wanted was to seek better opportunities outside Pakistan for his three children.”

Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Saturday that it would repatriate the 22 survivors of the recent boat accident off the coast of Morocco, but there’s little closure on the horizon for the families of those who died.

Instead, the tragedy has left in its wake a series of questions. How did the people on the boat die? Why were they travelling to Europe from West Africa – an unlikely and new route for irregular Pakistani migrants?

And why were people like Rehan, from families with some financial stability, risking their lives to get to Europe in the first place?

‘Tortured to death’

This incident on the Western Mediterranean route comes just weeks after four other vessels sank in the central Mediterranean in December last year. In those tragedies, 200 people were rescued, but nearly 50 were reported dead or missing, including at least 40 Pakistanis.

One of the deadliest shipwrecks in the Mediterranean occurred in June 2023, when more than 700 people, including nearly 300 Pakistanis, died after the Adriana, an ageing fishing trawler, capsized near the Greek island of Pylos.

In the latest incident, the Pakistani Foreign Ministry initially announced on January 16 that the boat had “capsized” near Dakhla, a port city in the disputed Western Sahara territory controlled by Morocco. But families of the victims claim their loved ones were “beaten” and “tortured” before being thrown overboard.

Aslam, 49, said survivors from his village reported that pirates on another boat attacked them, stole their belongings and assaulted passengers with hammers before throwing some into the sea.

“We were able to talk with some of the surviving boys in Dakhla, who shared how pirates repeatedly attacked their boat for a week, torturing and throwing people overboard,” he said.

A similar account was shared by Chaudhry Ahsan Gorsi, a businessman from Dhola village near Gujrat city in Punjab province.

Gorsi lost his nephews, Atif Shehzad and Sufyan Ali, who paid 3.5 million rupees ($12,500) to agents to facilitate their journey. Survivors informed him about the brutal circumstances of their deaths.

“These boys sold their land to raise the money and left last August,” Gorsi told Al Jazeera. “But I could never have imagined they would meet such a gruesome fate – physically attacked, tortured and thrown into the water,” he said.

Following the rescue of the boat last week, the Pakistani government sent an investigation team to Rabat to probe the allegations. However, their report has not yet been made public.

“We are still conducting our investigation and have interviewed the survivors about their experiences,” Rabia Kasuri, Pakistan’s acting ambassador to Morocco, told Al Jazeera from Rabat, where she has served for the past two years. Investigators, she said, were still “trying to figure out the details of what unfolded during the days when the boat was stranded in the sea”.

A new route

Despite being one of Pakistan’s most fertile regions, and the home of several industries manufacturing electronic goods such as refrigerators, fans, sports and surgical goods, Punjab’s districts of Gujrat, Sialkot, Jhelum, and Mandi Bahauddin have been hubs for people seeking to migrate to Europe for decades.