Libyan border guards have rescued migrants from sun-Saharan Africa, who were left without food, water, or shelter in a remote desert area near the Tunisian border, an official told the AFP.
The Libyan border guard transferred them to the Tunisian authorities, after finding them in the scorching heat, where some of them said they had been “left to die.”
In the past few days, the border guard found at least six men, and a group of women and children who were abandoned, with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius.
The migrants were lost in an uninhabited area near the town of Al-Asha, about 150 kilometers southwest of Tripoli, and about 15 kilometers from the Libyan-Tunisian border.
One of the migrants said, “We lived in Tunis and then in Jirjus. The Tunisian police expelled us to Libya.” He added that he wants to return to Tunisia, where his wife and children still are.
This incident highlights the ongoing issue of migrants attempting to cross into Europe through dangerous routes, including Libya, where they often face dire living conditions, abuse, and violence.
Last week, at least 500 sub-Saharan migrants were transferred across Tunisia, after being pushed into a dangerous no-man’s-land on the Libyan border, where they were trapped for a week, without access to basic necessities, according to the Associated Press (AP).
The group was driven out earlier this month, amid a spike in anti-migrant and racism-fuelled tensions, linked to a killing in the Tunisian port city of Sfax. The city remains a hub for traffickers organising risky, and often deadly boat journeys across the Mediterranean to Italy.
One such boat sank on Sunday, off the Tunisian coast. Coast Guard officers retrieved one body, rescued 11 people, and declared 10 others missing, the Sfax prosecutor’s office said.
The fate of hundreds of migrants pushed into the border region drew concern from international humanitarian groups. It also raised questions about Tunisia’s migration policies, weeks after the European Union offered Tunisia’s increasingly authoritarian government $1 billion dollars to help its slumping economy — and to beef up border services to stop migrant boats from crossing to Europe.
A 29-year-old man from Ivory Coast said that uniformed men had taken migrants from their homes in Sfax, in the middle of the night in early July. They brought some 600 people to the border area between the Mediterranean, and the Tunisian-Libyan land border near Ben Guerdane.
