Six held for migrants’ deaths

AUTHORITIES in Bangladesh have arrested as many as 19 suspected human smugglers following the killings last month of 26 Bangladeshis in Libya who were trying to reach Europe illegally, police said yesterday.

Detectives have arrested six since Sunday in Dhaka in connection with the migrant workers who were killed or injured in Libya, raising the total number of detained suspects to 19, said Abdul Baten, additional commissioner of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police.

A series of arrests have been made in Dhaka and elsewhere in recent weeks, with Bangladesh’s police chief saying the smugglers will not be spared.

In last month’s attack in Libya, the family of a slain Libyan human trafficker attacked a group of migrants in a town that recently had changed hands amid the fighting over the country’s capital, killing 26 Bangladeshis and four African migrants.

The Libyan government has said 11 other Bangladeshis were wounded in the May 28 attack.

The UN migration agency said the migrants were shot and killed in a smuggling warehouse in the desert town of Mizdah, where a group of migrants were being held.

Baten said the crackdown on the rogue recruiters of migrant workers and human smugglers continued after two separate cases were filed by the victims’ families following the killings.

He said it appeared that the victims of the attack had been trafficked to Libya via India, the UAE and Egypt. He also said the victims were detained in various camps and subjected to torture.

The traffickers made video and audio recordings of the victims and sent them to their families in Bangladesh to extract money, Baten said.

Bangladesh’s inspector-general of police, Benazir Ahmed, had earlier said that “the way our people were brutally killed is unacceptable. No one will be spared who has deceived our citizens”.

Migrants fleeing poverty and conflict in Africa and the Middle East typically pass through Libya on their way to Europe.

The Libyan coast guard, trained by the EU to keep migrants from reaching European shores, intercepts boats at sea and returns them to Libya, where many migrants land in detention centres rife with torture.