Violence forces Filipinos to flee Libya

MANILA: The Philippines dispatched its foreign minister yesterday to oversee the evacuation of 13 000 citizens from Libya after a Filipino construction worker was beheaded and a nurse gangraped there.

Foreign secretary Albert del Rosario said he is reprising a 2011 mission to Tunisia that also evacuated, mostly by ferry, thousands of Filipino workers during the uprising that toppled Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

“Our major challenge, as in 2011, is to convince our folks that they must leave Libya at the soonest time to avoid the perils of a highly exacerbating situation there,” he said.

Greece is sending a frigate and two other vessels to Libya to evacuate workers at its embassy in Tripoli as well as a few hundred Chinese and European nationals, government officials said.

A second naval vessel, Prometheus, and a passenger ferry are expected to help evacuate workers from countries including Britain and Cyprus, officials said.

France closed its embassy on Wednesday and evacuated 30 French nationals from Tripoli, a few days after the US embassy evacuated its staff across the Tunisian border under heavy military escort.

The Philippine government ordered a mandatory evacuation on July 20, hours after the discovery in Benghazi city of the beheaded remains of a Filipino construction worker who had been abducted five days earlier. It also imposed a travel ban to the violence plagued country. On Wednesday a Filipino nurse was abducted by a gang of youths outside her residence in the capital Tripoli then taken elsewhere where she was gang-raped by up to six suspects, the foreign department said.

She was released two hours later and a Filipino consular team took her to hospital for treatment, a foreign department spokesman said.

Despite the dangers, Del Rosario said many of the Filipinos are refusing to leave because they would be out of a job back home. – Sapa-AFP and Reuters