Tripoli, March 16: One hundred and fifty illegal immigrants from Somalia have been arrested on the sea shore at Tajoura, east of the Tripoli, . . .[restrict]the head of the Tajoura brigade said on Friday.
According to Ahmed Hubaishi, the Somalis who were discovered by brigade members were in two groups. He said that after initial questioning they had been handed over to the security authorities for further investigations.
Yesterday, Thursday, security officials in Benghazi said that they had arrested members of a human tracking organization and detained 52 illegal immigrants held captive at a farm outside the city. An official said that the organisation had been recruiting and then “abducting” Bangladeshi and Somali immigrants.
The commander of the defence ministry’s investigation division Hussein Khamees Al-Sahli said that the organisation had been bringing illegal immigrants from Bangladesh across the Egyptian-Libyan border in cooperation with Libyan drivers and the Libyan owner of the farm.
He said that immigrants were lured into Libya with offers of work but that immediately after their arrival in Benghazi they were held at the farm “and demands are sent to their parents to pay a ransom of more than one thousand dollars into a bank in Bangladesh”.
Al-Sahli said that the network administrator, a Bangladeshi named as Rahman Abdul-Qaddus, had “managed over three months to bring nearly 200 illegal immigrants from Bangladesh in the same way.”
He also claimed that the Libyan farm-owner had used the Somalis as slave labour in homes and other farms.
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