By Ajnadin Mustafa.
Tripoli, 31 July 2015:
Uncertainty still surrounds the fate of two of the four Indian teachers kidnapped on Wednesday while . . .[restrict]on their way back to India. Two of the seized men were released today.
They are reported to have said that their abductors had suggested that their colleagues might be released tomorrow. All four have been working at Sirte Univeristy which has been closed since Daesh took over the town.
According to the Hindustan Times, Vijay Kumar, the university’s head of English and Lakshmikant were released early today. They remained unclear as to why they had all been seized in the first place and why their two fellow teachers were still being held.
The men had set out in two taxis for Tripoli and their flight home via Dubai. They were stopped some 50 kilometres from the capital by armed men. Their seizure was only known about when the wife of one of the victims called his mobile phone. For one reason or another, this phone had been left in the taxi and the taxi driver answered and explained what had happened.
The two free academics were dropped off close to where they had been seized. India’s Libyan diplomatic mission which is partly located in Tunis and Valetta is understood to run on a skeleton staff in Tripoli.
Before the revolution there were some 18,000 Indian nationals living in Tripoli, working in particular as doctors, technicians and teachers. The government in Delhi has issued repeated warnings, the latest on 6 July, that its citizens should get out of the country. There are reportedly still however around 2,000 Indians remaining in Libya. On 21 June Tripoli was one of the venues for India’s international Yoga Day celebrations. [/restrict]
