The employees of the Benina International Airport administration and the Libyan Airlines Company announced a sit-in inside the Benina Airport terminal because they had not received their salaries for 17 months.
The sit-in employees at Benina Airport called on the companies that carry out domestic flights on Saturday, to inform the reservation offices and agents, to change the reservations of passengers without a fine due to the strike of the airport employees and the Ground Handling Company.
For its part, Afriqiyah Airways on its Facebook page announced the cancellation of its scheduled domestic flights on Saturday. This came due to the continued sit-in by Benina International Airport employees and the Libyan Ground Handling Company. As for international flights, they will be operated normally and regularly.
Notably, the Libyan state-owned Afriqiyah Airways announced that its first flight coming from Mitiga airport in Tripoli landed in Cairo International Airport after a suspension that lasted 7 years.
The company shared some pictures of the flight crew on its Facebook page, announcing that the first flight from Benina International Airport is set to take off from Benghazi at 11:30 AM tomorrow.
Afriqiyah Airways plans to fly 9 weekly flights from Libyan airports to Cairo International Airport while adhering to preventive measures against the COVID-19 virus, informed sources said.
This includes abiding by the Egyptian government’s policy of banning visitors from abroad from entering the country until they present a negative PCR test result 72 hours before the flight.
This does not include children under 6 years of age of all nationalities.
The Egyptian Civil Aviation Authority suspended flights between Libya and Cairo in 2014 due to the insecurity and political turbulence that was rampant in Libya in the past 7 years.
The decision to resume flights came after a visit to Cairo paid by the Libyan Prime Minister Abdelhamid Al-Dbaiba a few days ago, where a number of agreements were signed between the two countries.
Egypt and Libya signed more than 14 economic agreements and memoranda of understanding (MoUs) in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, with an initial value exceeding billions of dollars.