A UN migration company official expressed issues Friday over the disappearance of hundreds of Europe-bound migrants who had been intercepted and returned to Libya as increasingly determined folks threat their lives making an attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
According to Safa Msehli, a spokeswoman for the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the Libyan coast guard, which receives funds from the European Union, intercepted greater than 24,000 Europe-bound migrants within the Mediterranean to date this yr, together with over 800 this week alone.
However, solely 6,000 have been accounted for in official detention centres within the North African nation, she mentioned. The destiny and whereabouts of hundreds of different migrants stay unknown, she added.
“We fear that many are ending up in the hands of criminal groups and traffickers, while others are being extorted for release,” Msehli mentioned.
A spokesman for Libya’s Interior Ministry, which oversees the detention centres, didn’t instantly reply to a request by The Associated Press for remark.
Libya has for years been a hub for African and Middle Eastern migrants fleeing warfare and poverty of their nations and hoping for a greater life in Europe. The oil-rich nation plunged into chaos following a NATO-backed rebellion that toppled and killed longtime autocrat Moammar Gadhafi in 2011.
Traffickers have exploited the chaos and sometimes pack determined households into ill-equipped rubber or picket boats that stall and founder alongside the perilous Central Mediterranean route. Thousands have drowned alongside the way in which. They have been implicated in widespread abuses of migrants, together with torture and abduction for ransom.
The variety of migrants intercepted and returned to Libya to date this yr is greater than double the quantity for 2020, when greater than 11,890 had been introduced again to shore.
Those returned to shore have been taken to government-run detention centres, the place they’re usually abused and extorted for ransom below the very nostril of U.N. officers. They are sometimes held in depressing circumstances. Libya’s authorities receives thousands and thousands in European help cash paid to gradual the tide of migrants crossing the Mediterranean.
Guards have been accused of sexually assaulting feminine migrants in no less than one government-run detention centre. Many migrants additionally merely disappear from the detention centres, offered to traffickers or to different centres, The Associated Press had reported in 2019.
More than 1,100 migrants had been reported lifeless or presumed lifeless in quite a few boat mishaps and shipwrecks off Libya to date this yr, in comparison with no less than 978 reported lifeless or presumed lifeless throughout all of final yr, based on IOM.
