Niger authorities have rescued 72 women and children who were stranded in the scorching Sahara desert after their truck got a flat tyre.
The people who found them were on their way to the burial site for some of the 92 migrants who died of thirst after a similar incident last month.
"They were spotted in the middle of the desert by a delegation from Agadez that was on its way to the graves of the migrants who died recently," Azaoua Mamane, from the Niger-based aid group Synergie, told AFP on Monday.
A local security official confirmed the rescue but provided no details.
Mamane said the group of migrants from Niger, consisting of 20 women and 52 children, were on their way back from Algeria - "tired and hungry (but) apparently in good health".
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Upon hearing of last month's tragedy, in which 92 migrants perished stranded in the desert when their truck broke down, they had decided to leave their life of begging in southern Algeria and return home.
One of the group's rescued women, Baraka Souley, said the migrants, from southern Niger, "were voluntarily returning to their homeland after those horrible deaths".
"In Algeria we lived from begging," she added. But these "horrible deaths deeply affected us, shocked us. We immediately decided to go back. We lost our peace of mind."
Souley said their truck, which had left from the main southern Algerian town of Tamanrasset, burst a tyre in the desert, causing a panic among the migrants.
"We gathered on the roadside and started praying that we must not die like the others," the young woman in her thirties added, as children cried behind her.
They were eventually driven back on Monday to Arlit, the last town in northern Niger before the border with Algeria, in vehicles sent by the governor of nearby Agadez.
