A collection of makeshift warehouses sits along the highway in Ghout al-Shaal, a run-down neighborhood of workshops and junkyards in western Tripoli, Libya’s capital. Once a cement and concrete warehouse, the site was reopened in January this year, its walls expanded and covered with barbed wire.
Men in camouflage black-and-blue uniforms with Kalashnikov rifles stand guard around a Dumpster that passes for an office. At the gate, a sign: “Department for Combating Illegal Migration”. The facility is a secret prison for migrants. Its name, in Arabic, is Al Mabani (the buildings).
At 3 am on February 5, 2021, Aliou Candé, a 28-year-old migrant from Guinea-Bissau, robust and shy, arrived in prison. He had left home a year and a half earlier because his farm was failing and he had decided to join two brothers in Europe. But while trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea in a rubber boat with 130 other migrants, the Libyan Coast Guard intercepted them and took them to Al Mabani.
They were pushed into cell 4, where around 200 migrants were being held. There was almost no place to sit among the huddled bodies, and those on the ground crawled sideways so they wouldn’t be trampled on. Fluorescent lights overhead were on all night. A small grille on the door, about a foot wide, was the only source of natural light.
Birds nestled in the rafters, their feathers and droppings falling from above. Candé huddled in a far corner and began to panic. “What should we do?” he asked a cellmate.
Over the past six years, the European Union, tired of the financial and political costs of receiving migrants from sub-Saharan Africa, has created a shadow system that bars them before they reach Europe. It has equipped and trained the Libyan Coast Guard, a paramilitary organization linked to the country’s militias, to patrol the Mediterranean, sabotaging humanitarian rescue operations and capturing migrants.
Migrants are then detained indefinitely in a network of for-profit prisons run by militias. In September, around 6,000 migrants were arrested, most of them in Al Mabani.
International aid agencies have documented a range of abuses: detainees tortured with electric shocks, children raped by guards, families extorted to pay ransoms, men and women sold into forced labor. “The European Union has done something that it has carefully considered and planned for many years,” says Salah Marghani, Libya’s justice minister from 2012 to 2014. “
Candé grew up on a farm near the village of Sintchan Demba Gaira. There is no cell phone signal, paved roads, plumbing or electricity there. He lived in a mud house, painted yellow and blue, with his wife, Hava, and their two young children. He listened to foreign musicians and followed European football clubs; he spoke English and French and learned Portuguese on his own, with the hope of one day living in Portugal. Jacaria, one of Candé’s three brothers, told me, “Aliou was a lovely boy—he never got into trouble. He was a hard worker. People respected him.”
Candé’s farm produced manioc, mango and cashew nuts — a crop that represents 90% of the country’s exports. But the environment has started to change, probably as a result of the climate crisis.
“We don’t feel cold anymore during the cold season, and the heat comes earlier than it should,” says Jacaria. Heavy rains left the farm accessible only by canoe for most of the year; the dry spells seemed to last longer than the previous generation. Candé had four lean cows that produced little milk. There were more and more mosquitoes, which spread disease. When one of Candé’s children contracted malaria, the trip to the hospital took a day, and he nearly died.
A devout Muslim, Candé feared he was failing God to support his family. “He felt guilty and jealous,” Bobo, another brother of Candé’s, told me. Jacaria emigrated to Spain, and Denbas, his third brother, to Italy. Both sent money and photos of fancy restaurants. Candé’s father, Samba, told me: “Those who go abroad bring a fortune home.”
Hava was eight months pregnant, but Candé’s family encouraged him to go to Europe, promising to take care of their children. “All the people of his generation went abroad and were successful,” said his mother, Aminatta. “So why not him?” On the morning of September 13, 2019, Candé left for Europe with a Koran, two pants, a T-shirt, a leather diary and 600 euros. “I don’t know how long this will take,” he told his wife that morning. “But I love you and I will come back.”
No one in the world other than those working in Al Mabani knew that Candé had been captured. He had not been charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer and received no indication of how long he would be detained. In the early days of his detention, he was mostly reserved, submitting to the grim routines of the place.
The prison is controlled by a militia calling itself the Public Security Agency, and their snipers patrolled the hallways. About 1,500 migrants were held there, in eight cells divided by gender. There was only one bathroom for every group of a hundred people, and Candé often had to urinate in a water bottle or defecate in the showers.
Migrants slept on mats on the floor. Since there wasn’t enough for everyone, they took turns in pairs: one during the day, the other at night. Prisoners fought over who would sleep in the shower, which had better ventilation. Twice a day they had to march in single file to the courtyard and were prohibited from looking at the sky or speaking. The guards, like zookeepers, placed bowls of food on the ground, and migrants gathered in circles to eat.
The guards beat prisoners who disobeyed orders with whatever they had at hand: a shovel, a hose, a cable, a tree branch. “They hit anybody for no reason,” says Tokam Martin Luther, an older Cameroonian who slept on the mat next to Candé.
The detainees speculated that the guards dumped the bodies of the dead behind one of the complex’s outer walls, near a pile of bricks and remnants of plaster. On the cell walls were scrawled notes of determination: “A soldier never backs down” and “With our eyes closed, we move forward.”
The guards offered migrants their freedom for a fee of 2,500 Libyan dinars—about R$3,000. During meals, guards circulated with a cell phone, allowing detainees to call parents of migrants who could pay the fee. But Candé’s family couldn’t pay that much in a ransom. Luther told me, “If you don’t have anyone to call, you just sit there.”
Three weeks after Candé arrived in Al Mabani, a group of detainees drew up an escape plan.
Moussa Karouma, a migrant from Côte d’Ivoire, and several others defecated in a dumpster and left her in her cell for two days, until the stench became unbearable. “It was my first time in prison,” Karouma told me. “I was terrified.” When the guards opened the cell doors, 19 migrants got out. They scaled the roof of a bathroom, jumped over the fifteen-foot wall and disappeared into a maze of alleys near the prison.
For those who stayed, the consequences were bloody. The guards called for reinforcements, who shot the cells and beat the prisoners. “There was a guy in my ward who was hit in the head with a gun until he passed out and started shaking,” a migrant later told Amnesty International. “They didn’t call an ambulance to pick him up that night… He was still breathing but he couldn’t speak… I don’t know what happened to him… I don’t know what he had done.”
In the weeks that followed, Candé tried to avoid trouble and clung to a hopeful rumor: the guards were planning to release the migrants from their cell in honor of the Ramadan period in two months’ time. “You are miraculous,” Luther wrote in a journal he kept. “May his grace continue to protect all migrants around the world, especially those in Libya.”
This is the first article in a series produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project in partnership with Folha that examines the European Union’s partnership with Libya in the capture and detention of migrants trying to reach Europe. Subsequent articles in the series will be published in the next three weeks. The second chapter, to be published on the next 18th, details how the Libyan Coast Guard captured Aliou Candé as he tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea.
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