In May of that year, I traveled to Tripoli to investigate its migrant detention system. A dozen or more arrests had risen as a result of the European Union’s controversial efforts to, in effect, pay countries like Libya to do the often dirty work of immigration enforcement instead. With European support, the Libyan Coast Guard would work to catch the migrants while they were still crossing the Mediterranean, and whoever was captured would then be held in prisons across the country.
The partnership has caused outrage for years, and reports of abuses and killings by the Libyan Coast Guard and the violent militias that normally ran migrant prisons piled up. Europe never denied the horrors that were taking place, but it continued to commit itself over the years to maintaining its relations not only with Libya, but with other North African countries such as Tunisia and Niger.
Earlier this year, I heard the alarming story of a young migrant from Guinea-Bissau who had fled his home to Europe because his farm was failing and he was desperate for money to feed his family. His name was Aliou Candé, and he had been arrested at a recent but increasingly notorious facility in the Libyan capital. The prison was called Al Mabani, or “the buildings” in Arabic.
Once in Libya, I began to reconstruct the story of Candé towards Europe, his capture by the Libyan Coast Guard and his days in Al Mabani. I talked to his relatives in Guinea-Bissau and Libya as well. I identified and interviewed migrants who had been detained along with him. And I sought to detail as best I could Europe’s role in supporting Libya’s fight against migrants.
I discovered that at 10 pm on February 3, 2021, Candé and more than a hundred people left the coast of Libya on board an inflatable rubber raft. Candé had made a long and arduous journey from Guinea-Bissau to Niger, Morocco and Algeria, dodging criminals, trying to arrange transport to Europe, and finally arriving in Libya.
Now Libya was pulling away, and the night was cloudy and cold. Some of the migrants, excited by the departure, began to sing. The boat left the waters of Libya and reached the high seas around midnight. The Italian island of Lampedusa, which was her planned destination, was only a few hundred kilometers away, and Candé felt hopeful. Mounted on the side of the raft, he confidently told others aboard that he was not only sure he would make it to Europe, but that he was thinking of bringing his wife and children to join him.
A key element of the partnership between Europe and Libya to police migrants has been support for the country’s Coast Guard. The European Union has spent tens of millions of dollars to transform the Coast Guard into a formidable proxy force.
In 2018, the Italian government, with EU approval, helped the Coast Guard gain UN approval to extend its jurisdiction nearly 100 miles off the coast of Libya — in international waters and halfway down the Italian coast. Italy and the EU provided six speedboats, 30 Toyota Land Cruisers, radios, satellite phones, inflatable dinghies and 500 uniforms.
Perhaps the most valuable help comes from the Frontex agency, founded in 2004 to secure Europe’s border with Russia. In 2016, Frontex began leading a “systematic effort to capture” migrants crossing the sea. The agency maintains an almost constant surveillance of the Mediterranean through drones and charter aircraft. When it detects a migrant vessel, Frontex sends photos and location information to partners in the region, including local government agencies.
In an exchange for WhatsApp earlier this year, for example, a Frontex official wrote to someone who identified himself as a “Captain of the Libyan Coast Guard”, saying: “Good morning sir — we have a boat adrift in [coordenadas]. People pouring water. Please confirm this message”.
Legal experts argue that these actions violate international laws against the repression or return of migrants to places that violate human rights.
Frontex officials responded to a request to open records, which indicate that from February 1-5, when Candé was at sea, the agency exchanged thirty-seven emails with the Coast Guard (Frontex refused to disclose the content of the emails, saying it would pose a risk to “migrant security”).
Once they have the coordinates, the Libyan Coast Guard rushes to intercept the boats and capture the people on board, sometimes firing weapons at the rafts and dinghies, sometimes causing the boat to overturn. On one occasion earlier this year, a Coast Guard ship fired and sank a boat with migrants and five people drowned while commanders filmed with their cell phones.
That February night, Candé and the others on board managed to reach more than seventy miles off the Libyan coast, already in international waters, but still within the official Libyan Coast Guard search and rescue zone that Europe had helped to create. . At around 5 pm on February 4, the migrants noticed a plane above them, which circled for 15 minutes and then flew away.
Data from the ADS-B Exchange, an entity that tracks aviation traffic, shows that it was an Eagle1, a white Beech King Air 350 surveillance plane leased by Frontex (the agency declined to comment on its role in the capture). About three hours later, a boat appeared on the horizon. “The closer we got, the brighter it got — and we saw the black and green lines of the flag,” Mohamed David Soumahoro, who befriended Candé on the boat, told me. “Everyone started crying and holding their heads, saying, ‘Shit, it’s Libya.'”
The boat, a Vittoria P350 made of steel, fiberglass and kevlar, was one of the vessels handed over to the Libyan Coast Guard by the EU. The Coast Guard hit the boat three times and ordered the migrants to climb aboard. “Move!” the officers shouted. One of them hit several migrants with the butt of a rifle; another whipped them with a rope. The migrants were taken back to land and loaded onto buses and trucks. Candé had no idea, but he was being taken to one of the worst prisons in Libya: Al Mabani.
Hardly any Western journalists are allowed into Libya, but I had managed to get visas for myself and three other people on my staff. When we arrived in Tripoli, we were placed in a hotel in the center of the city and had a modest security team. I had the impression that we were being watched by the authorities.
But I was determined to investigate the story of Candé and the prison in which he was held. We managed to launch a drone over Al Mabani and captured a scene of migrants grouped in a courtyard, heads to the ground, catching if they looked up. It looked like they had just been fed – a grim routine in which bowls of food were placed in the courtyard and men in groups of five took what they could. We also identified and contacted migrants who were with Candé but escaped from Al Mabani.
Several days after arriving in Libya, I traveled to Gargaresh, a community of migrants, to speak with ex-detainees. Soumahoro met me on the main road and quickly escorted me to a windowless room occupied by two other migrants. Over a chana masala meal, he told me about his time in prison.
Migrants in Al Mabani were beaten for whispering, speaking in their native language or laughing. The worst was happening in the so-called “isolation room”, an abandoned gas station behind the women’s cell with a Shell sign hanging in front of it. The “room” had no bathroom, so prisoners had to defecate in a corner; the smell was so bad that the guards wore masks when they visited.
The agents even tied the hands of a detainee to a rope suspended from a steel beam in the ceiling before beating him. “It’s not so bad to see a friend or a man screaming while being tortured,” says Soumahoro. “But to see a six-foot-one man beating a woman with a whip…” In March, Soumahoro organized a hunger strike to protest the guards’ violence and was taken to the isolation room, where he was tied headfirst down and beaten several times. “They hang you like a piece of clothing,” he says.
Several former detainees I spoke with in Tripoli said they had witnessed sexual abuse. Adjara Keita, a 36-year-old migrant from Côte d’Ivoire who was held in Al Mabani for two months, told me that women were often taken out of their cells to be raped by guards. “They came back in tears.” One day, after two women escaped from Al Mabani, the guards, in a seemingly random act of retribution, grabbed Keita, took her to a nearby office, and beat her.
The guards also employed some detainees as collaborators, a tactic that kept them divided. Mohamed Soumah, a 23-year-old from the Republic of Guinea, also called Guinea Conakry, had volunteered to help with daily tasks and was soon pressed for information: which migrants hated each other? What were the agitators? When migrants paid ransom to be released, Soumah conducted the negotiations.
As a reward, he could sleep with the cooks who lived across the street from the complex. At one point, as a gift for his loyalty, the guards allowed him to choose several migrants to be released. He could even leave the compound, though he never got far. “I knew they would find me and spank me if I tried to leave,” Soumah told me.
An international aid organization visited the prison twice a week and found that detainees were covered in bruises and cuts, avoided eye contact and backed away with loud noises. Migrants sometimes handed small notes of despair written on the backs of torn World Health Organization pamphlets to the team. Many told aid staff that they felt “missing” and asked someone to tell their families they were alive.
During one visit, the team was unable to enter Candé’s cell because it was too crowded—it was estimated that there were three detainees per square meter. Instead, they met the migrants in the courtyard. Overcrowding was intense and tuberculosis and Covid-19 were common among detainees. During another visit, the team heard about beatings that had occurred the night before and cataloged fractures, cuts, abrasions and blunt trauma; a child was so badly injured that he could not walk.
In the middle of my meal with Soumahoro, my phone rang and a policeman yelled at me, “You are not allowed to talk to migrants. You cannot be in Gargaresh.” He told me that if I didn’t leave immediately, I would be arrested. When I got back to my car, the policeman, who was standing next to him, said that if I spoke to any more migrants I would be expelled from the country. After that, my team and I couldn’t venture very far.
This is the second article in a series produced by The Outlaw Ocean Project in partnership with leaf which examines the European Union’s partnership with Libya in capturing and detaining migrants trying to reach Europe. The third chapter, to be published on the 25th, details the kidnapping of the Outlaw Ocean Project team while conducting the report in Libya.
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