How Europe allowed Malta to hand migrants over to Libyan militia

On an August night, a trawler weighed anchor and sailed away from the coast, off the Akkar district in the far north of Lebanon. This departure is a breath of hope for the hundred or so passengers on board, many of them exiles from the Levant. Some are Syrian, others Lebanese. The crossing is supposed to take them to one of Europe’s southern coasts – Malta, Italy – via a long sea route that bypasses Greece for thousands of kilometers.

“When we started the journey, I was optimistic. The sea was good and everything was going well,” Bassel recalls. He prefers to use an assumed name for security reasons. Before leaving a Lebanon mired in political and economic crisis to join his brother in Scandinavia, he had already fled his native Syria, devastated by war. “I never expected to end up in Libya,” he says over the phone.

On the eighth day of its voyage, while off the coast of Malta, the trawler was approached by an unidentified speedboat. It belonged neither to the Maltese authorities, nor to their Italian counterparts who regularly operate in the area, nor even to the armed groups united under the banner of the Libyan coastguard. “We told them to leave us alone and that we had children and women on board,” says Bassel. “But they accused us of having weapons and drugs and opened fire.” The old trawler was unable to outrun the powerful speedboat, and its occupants boarded the fishing vessel after a three-hour chase.

“Tareq Bin Zeyad”: three words engraved on the blue hull of the speedboat give information about the identity of its sailors. This is the name of a major militia integrated into the Libyan National Army (ANL), led by Saddam Haftar, son of Marshal Haftar, the so-called “strongman of the East”. Since the spring, these armed men have been regularly intercepting migrant boats off the coast of Libya and beyond, in the Maltese zone, which comes under the jurisdiction of the European Union (EU).

For months, Le Monde Afrique – along with its partners from the collaborative platform Lighthouse Reports, the Qatari TV channel Al-Jazeera, the bi-weekly Malta Today, the German news outlet Der Spiegel and the Syrian journalists’ collective SIRAJ – has been investigating this Tareq Bin Zeyad vessel, and has discovered that on several occasions the Maltese armed forces and the European border guard agency Frontex have provided the militia with the GPS coordinates of boats seeking to reach Europe. This information led to the migrants being intercepted and forcibly sent to Libya, where they are being mistreated, in violation of international law.

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Publish date : 2023-12-11 08:00:00

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