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Laayoune – Seven Sahrawi families on Friday benefited from a new family visit flights facilitated by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), making it the first such trips in 2012.
Under this programme, members of Sahrawi families living in the Moroccan southern provinces visit their relatives in the Tindouf camps in south-western Algeria, and vice-versa.
Forty-five people from 7 families were included in the new operation, said a statement of the Moroccan coordination office with the MINURSO.
Therefore, 33 people from 6 families embarked Friday morning aboard a UN aircraft at the airport of Smara (Morocco’s south) bounding for Tindouf, before 12 people from the same family landed on the same plane from the Tindouf camps, added the same source.
Necessary steps have been taken to ensure that the operation took place in good conditions, the statement said.
The new exchange brings the number of people who benefit from this humanitarian programme, since its launch in March 2004, to 12,288, including 5911 people from the southern provinces and 6377 people from the Tindouf camps.
