By Alesssandra Bocchi.
Tunis, 29 January 2017:
Allegations of sub-Saharan migrants being killed, tortured, raped or otherwise abused in Libya have been made by German and Nigerian officials.
Apparent evidence of such abuses was made in a report by the German embassy in Niger to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin. It spoke of “concentration camp-like conditions” in the camps operated by smugglers in Libya, the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag newspaper reported today.
According to evidence gathered by the embassy, “executions of countless migrants unable to pay, torture, rapes and abandonment in the desert occur on a regular basis”.
The report was said to be based on testimonies of a number of eyewitnesses, who spoke of killings every week – especifically on Fridays. This was being done, it was said, to make room for new migrants in the prisons.
Meanwhile, in an equally alarmist statement, an official from the Nigerian foreign ministry said that Nigerian migrants had to stop heading to Libya because they faced effective death sentences there.
“It is a known fact that Libya has been executing black illegal immigrants for years,” senior special assistant to the Nigerian president on foreign affairs, Abike Dabiri-Erewa, has claimed, without stating where the evidence came from. She added she had personally intervened in the cases of some 24 Nigerians about to be executed in Libya.
International humanitarian agencies and NGOs who have visited migrant detention centres in Libya have, however, never spoken of systematic executions. A 2016 report by Human Rights Watch, however, signalled how armed groups and guards at migrant detention facilities subjected many to forced labour, torture, sexual abuse and extortion.
There have also been other reports of abandonment in the desert. A Ghanaian migrant working in shop in Tripoli to earn enough to pay for the boat fare across the Mediterrnanean told the Libya Herald that he and two others were the sole survivors from a group of 130 migrants who had set out from Niger. They had been abandoned south of Sebha, he claimed.
It has not been possible to verify his story.
