picture alliance, AP Photo, Manu Brabo
An Egyptian migrant who fled captivity and was found wandering, lost and exhausted, along the Libyan coastline became the crucial link that unravelled a smuggling and extortion network south of Benghazi, leading security forces to rescue 120 fellow migrants held in brutal conditions by human traffickers.
The man had escaped from what authorities described as “a den used to torture migrants and blackmail their families,” where captives were beaten into recording distress videos sent to relatives abroad to extort ransom payments. Discovered in the coastal town of Bishr, he led security services to the locations where the other migrants remained imprisoned.
According to a statement released late Monday by the Ajdabiya security directorate, the rescue operation stretched across almost two weeks before all the captives were freed. During their ordeal, the migrants had been “forced to plead for help under whippings and beatings, while their suffering is documented in videos sent to their families to extort money from them.”
The freed migrants — Egyptians and other nationalities — were subsequently deported, though the directorate offered no further details on where they were sent.
The operation also yielded grim discoveries. The bodies of two Bangladeshi migrants and one Egyptian were recovered from the Mediterranean shore at Bishr, located roughly 122 kilometres west of Ajdabiya. A boat was found nearby. Images released by the directorate showed migrants seated on the ground following their rescue, alongside seized passports, boat engines, blue plastic water containers, and wooden vessels — some fully assembled, others still under construction. Authorities also seized a small boat-building facility, and arrest warrants were issued for traffickers described as “fugitive.”
Libya has served as a primary gateway for migrants attempting the perilous crossing to Europe since the NATO-backed uprising that toppled longtime leader Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. The country’s collapse into competing armed factions and weak central governance created conditions in which criminal smuggling networks have flourished, preying on migrants from across sub-Saharan Africa, the Horn of Africa, Egypt, and South Asia.
Beyond serving as a transit corridor, Libya’s oil-dependent economy attracts economic migrants seeking work — but the sprawling country’s chronic insecurity leaves them acutely vulnerable to kidnapping, forced labour, and violent exploitation at the hands of traffickers operating with near-impunity across its vast desert interior and coastline.
By: Andrews Kwesi Yeboah