Migrants stuck in Libya face brutal choices

Flimsy boats sink, detention centres come under attack

CAIRO — A boat from Libya carrying 86 migrants sank in the Mediterranean and left only three survivors, authorities said Thursday, after an airstrike on a detention centre near the Libyan capital killed dozens of others.

The twin tragedies illustrate the almost unthinkable choice facing those who have reached the North Africa coast while seeking a better life in Europe: Risk a hazardous sea voyage in a flimsy, rubber-sided boat, or face being crammed into a detention centre, where some of the migrants say they have been forced to assemble weapons for someone else’s war.

“I fled from the war, to come to this hell of Libya,” said one teenager from sub-Saharan Africa who suffered minor injuries in Tuesday night’s airstrike near Tripoli. “My days are dark here.”

The International Organization for Migration said the boat sank late Wednesday off the Tunisian city of Zarzis and 82 of the migrants who had been on board were missing. Fishermen pulled four men from the water, and one died overnight, said Lorena Lando, the agency’s head in Tunisia, said. The boat, which had sailed from the Libyan port of Zuwara, was carrying twice as many people as should have been aboard, said Chamseddine Merzoug, a Tunisian Red Crescent volunteer.

The United Nations and aid groups blame the deaths in part on the European Union’s policy of partnering with militias in war-torn Libya to prevent migrants from trying to cross the sea, saying the policy leaves migrants at the mercy of brutal traffickers or confined in detention facilities near front lines, often without adequate food and water.

Migrants who survived the airstrike said they were conscripted by a militia to work in a weapons workshop at the Tajoura detention centre, which had been the focus of a UN warning in May after an earlier airstrike hit 100 metres away.

The wounded teenager said he fled war in his homeland at the age of 14, seeking to join fellow nationals who made it to Europe in rickety boats. But his journey was riddled with torture and abuse. By the time he reached the coast, Europe was no longer so welcoming and he was caught by the EU-funded Libyan coast guard and spent 20 months in the detention centre.

For the last eight months, he laboured without pay in the workshop adjacent to a hangar housing dozens of migrants, cleaning the militia’s weapons, from rifles to anti-aircraft guns, said the youth, who refused to give his name or nationality for fear of reprisal from the militias. When the UN or other aid agencies visit, migrants told the Associated Press, the militia hid the weapons.

The decision to store weapons at the facility in Tajoura, east of Tripoli, may have made it a target for the self-styled Libyan National Army, which is at war with an array of militias allied with a weak, UN-recognized government in the capital.

The Tripoli government has blamed the LNA and its foreign backers for the airstrike, which killed at least 44 and wounded more than 130. The LNA, led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter, says it targeted a nearby militia position and denies striking the hangar where the migrants were being held. UN human rights chief Michelle Bachelet said the attack might amount to a war crime.

Hifter, whose forces control much of eastern and southern Libya, has received support from Egypt, France, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Many of those who died in the attack were crushed under debris as they slept. Pictures shared by the migrants show the hangar reduced to rubble littered with body parts.

More than 48 hours afterward, relief workers were still removing bodies while the wounded lay on bloody mattresses in a courtyard, receiving medical aid.

The teen was sleeping when the munitions fell, obliterating the workshop and knocking him unconscious.

In the aftermath of the airstrike, several of the detainees told visiting aid workers that guards fired on them as they tried to escape.