BENGHAZI (Reuters) -More than 100 migrants, including five women, have been freed from captivity after being held for ransom by a gang in eastern Libya, the country’s attorney general said on Monday.
“A criminal group involved in organising the smuggling of migrants, depriving them of their freedom, trafficking them, and torturing them to force their families to pay ransoms for their release,” a statement from the attorney general said.
Libya has become a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe via the dangerous route across the desert and over the Mediterranean following the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
Many migrants desperate to make the crossing have fallen into the hands of traffickers. The freed migrants had been held in Ajdabiya, some 160 km (100 miles) from Libya’s second city Benghazi.
Five suspected traffickers from Libya, Sudan and Egypt, have been arrested, officials said.
The attorney general and Ajdabiya security directorate posted pictures of the migrants on their Facebook pages which they said had been retrieved from the suspects’ mobile phones.
They showed migrants with hands and legs cuffed with signs that they had been beaten.
In February, at least 28 bodies were recovered from a mass grave in the desert north of Kufra city. Officials said a gang had subjected the migrants to torture and inhumane treatment.
That followed another 19 bodies being found in a mass grave in the Jikharra area, also in southeastern Libya, a security directorate said, blaming a known smuggling network.
As of December 2024, around 825,000 migrants from 47 countries were recorded in Libya, according to U.N. data released in May.
Last week, the EU migration commissioner and ministers from Italy, Malta and Greece met with the internationally recognised prime minister of the national unity government, Abdulhamid Dbeibah, and discussed the migration crisis.
(Reporting by Ayman Werfali; writing by Ahmed Elumami; Editing by Ros Russell)
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