The African nation’s attorney general says two foreigners are among the three suspects arrested for cruel treatment of illegal migrants
The bodies of at least 28 migrants have been recovered from a mass grave in a desert in southeastern Libya, the authorities of the North African country reported on Sunday.
The grave was found north of Kufra, a city located about 1,712km (1,064 miles) from the Libyan capital of Tripoli, according to a statement posted to Facebook from the attorney general’s office.
About 76 people were freed “from forced detention” following a raid on a human trafficking site, where the bodies were recovered, the attorney general stated.
“There was a gang whose members deliberately deprived illegal migrants of their freedom, tortured them, and subjected them to cruel, humiliating, and inhumane treatment,” the statement said.
Three suspects, including a Libyan and two foreigners have been arrested, it added.
The latest incident came after 19 bodies allegedly linked to human smuggling and illegal immigration activities were found in three mass graves on a farm in the desert town of Jikharra last Thursday. On the same day, the Libyan Red Crescent reported recovering ten bodies of migrants after a boat sank off of a port approximately 40 km from Tripoli. On January 26, the humanitarian organization announced that, with the permission of the country’s authorities, it had organized the burial of 11 unidentified bodies in Zawiya.
The oil-rich country, a destination for migrants from neighboring African states, has become a major transit point for human trafficking since the NATO-backed overthrow of its former leader, Muammar Gaddafi, in 2011. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) says around 787,326 migrants from 44 nationalities were living in Libya as of last October.
The UN migration agency has listed Libya as one of the most dangerous routes for people attempting to reach Europe by sea. In 2023, 4,984 migrants died or went missing during their journeys on routes within and from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, which includes Libya, according to a recent IOM Missing Migrants Project report. The figure represents an increase from the 3,820 recorded in 2022.
Earlier this year, the UN announced that the death toll and number of missing persons in the Mediterranean in 2024 had surpassed 2,200, with nearly 1,700 lives lost along the central Mediterranean route connecting Algeria, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia to Italy and Malta.
In 2023, a court in eastern Libya jailed 37 people for human trafficking, following the deaths of 11 migrants whose boat sank in the Mediterranean Sea en route to Europe. The Al-Bayda court of appeals handed down life sentences to five of the defendants, nine received 15 years behind bars, and the rest received one-year sentences.
