Nigerian migrants return from Libya with tales of horror

LAGOS: Some knelt and placed their foreheads to the ground in prayer. Several carried small children. After being stranded in Libya on a failed attempt to reach Europe, more than 250 Nigerian migrants were brought home and began sharing stories of abuse and fear.

“If they lock you up in a room, you hardly eat, that’s number one,” Ejike Ernest, one of the returnees, said on arrival on Tuesday in Lagos.

“You’ll urinate there, you’ll defe cate there and every morning, let me say three times a day, you will be severely beaten” until you can pay the money to be freed.

Nigeria’s government, its president appalled by recent CNN footage of a slave auction in Libya where migrant Africans were “sold like goats”, has committed to bringing its citizens home, along with a number of other African nations.

After disembarking from a plane chartered by Nigeria, the European Union and the International Organisation for Migration, some of the newest arrivals looked exhausted, some clutching sleepy children. Some were astonished by the way they had been treated.

“It’s heartbreaking when I see a 13yearold with a baby,” said Abike DabiriErewa, senior special assistant to Nigeria’s president on diaspora and foreign affairs.

“One 14yearold girl said she doesn’t know how many men have slept with her, she can’t count ... You wonder whether their lives can ever be the same again.”

The African Union and member states will repatriate more than 15,000 migrants stranded in Libya by the end of the year amid outrage over the slave auction footage, the AU’s deputy chairman said on Tuesday.

Between 400,000 and 700,000 African migrants are in dozens of camps across the chaotic North African country, often under inhumane conditions, AU Commission chairman Moussa Faki Mahamat told a summit of European and African leaders last week.

Europe has struggled to stem the flow of tens of thousands of Africans making the dangerous crossing of the Mediterranean. But many Africans still make the journey, risking death and abuse, saying high unemployment and climate change leave them little choice. — AP