HUNDREDS of African refugees are being bought and sold in “slave markets” across Libya every week, a human trafficker has told Al Jazeera, with many of them held for ransom or forced into prostitution and sexual exploitation to pay their captors and smugglers.
Many of them ended up being murdered by their smugglers in the open desert or die from thirst or car accidents in the vast Libyan desert, said Salman*, the human trafficker.
ALSO READ:Â Libya deports 139 Nigerian says NEMAÂ
A morgue in the southern city of Sabha – an entry point for many refugees coming from Africa – is overflowing with corpses, with faulty refrigerator making the situation worse, according to a Libyan health official.
The official in Sabha, 650km south of the capital Tripoli, described horrendous scenes of bodies dumped in threes, fives or more at the gates of the Sebha health facility by smugglers.
The refugees who died are never identified and many ended being buried without names or proper graves, he said.
The health official, who declined to give his name for security reasons, said Sabha’s morgue has only one dysfunctional refrigerator that can hold bodies for up to three days but end up keeping them for months and on.
“Bodies end up being decomposed inside the refrigerator and often give off a foul stench.
“We appealed to the World Health Organization to help us with a new refrigerator but we have yet to receive a positive response from them,” he told Al Jazeera.
Gateway to reach Europe
The refugees and migrants – most of them from Ghana, Nigeria, Cameroon, Zambia, Senegal, Gambia, and Sudan – are smuggled into Libya by a network of criminal gangs on the promise of reaching Europe’s shores.
Libya is the main gateway for people attempting to reach Europe by sea, with more than 150,000 people making the deadly crossing in each of the past three years.
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Tuesday that it had interviewed migrants from West African countries who recounted being traded in garages and car parks in Sabha.
The IOM said it had spoken to one Senegalese migrant, who was held in a private house in Sabha along with some 100 others. They were beaten up and forced to call their families to arrange money for their release. The unnamed migrant was then bought by another Libyan, who set a new price for his release.
Forced into prostitution
Salman said once he receives a wire transfer for the refugees from a “commander” in Niger, he starts the transportation process.
He said he charges between 1,000 Libyan dinars ($735) and 1,500 Libyan dinars ($1,100) per person, and once he receives payment, the migrants are loaded up on battered 4×4 vehicles and driven through Libya’s sweltering desert, where temperatures exceed 50C during the summer season.
“I pick up migrants from al-Qatron [in Libya] and transport them to Sabha,” he told Al Jazeera.
“This is a deal agreed upon with other commanders in Niger and other African countries.”
Al-Qatron, a small town about 300km south of Sabha and close to the Nigerien border, is the starting point for many of the thousands of migrants that enter Libya every year.
Once in Sabha, the refugees are taken under the control of a “commander” who provides them food, shelter, and protection, before they are sold as slaves to other smuggling rings or other commanders in various Libyan cities.
Hundreds of migrants stranded in Libya are returned to Nigeria
More than 200 Nigerian migrants stranded in Libya have been returned to their home country, Nigerian officials said.
The 242 migrants landed at Lagos airport on a Libyan Airlines flight at around 9:00 pm local time (3:00 pm ET) on Tuesday. Among them were women carrying children and at least one man in a wheelchair.
Nigerian authorities say they worked on returning the migrants from Libya in collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Some of the 242 men and women who returned had been in Libyan detention camps while others willingly approached the Nigerian embassy in Libya to return home because of hardship there, authorities said.
Abike Dabiri, a senior special adviser on foreign and diaspora affairs to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, said the government there had been working with the IOM, the Nigerian National Commission for Refugees, Migrants and Internally Displaced Persons (NCFRMI) and other local agencies to bring Nigerians back home.
The refugees are forced to live in either open courtyards or in ramshackle rooms without proper sanitation.
Ahmad*, a resident of Sabha, told al Jazeera that forced prostitution was widespread in the town.
UN considers sanctions to fight Libya slave trade
“The Abdel Kafi neighborhood is one of the main squares where the prostitution rings exist,” Ahmad told Al Jazeera by phone.
He added that people were being auctioned off in the town, with men and women fetching 1,000 Libyan dinars ($735). Others from Ghana and Cameroon might fetch several thousand Libyan dinars.
“Libyans don’t have a problem with African migrants,” Ahmad said, adding that in recent years Sabha had seen an influx from countries such as Ghana, Cameroon, Nigeria, and Zambia, along with Chad and Niger.
Mohamad Hasan, a Libyan national and a resident of Sebha, told Al Jazeera by phone that he witnessed five women being sold by one commander to another who immediately forced them into prostitution.
“I have seen African women being ordered to work in private nightclubs that cater to the migrant communities in Libya and are forced into prostitution,” he said.
Hasan, who owns a restaurant frequented by migrants, said, the “women, in particular, are helpless and for the most part are stuck in Libya with nowhere to go”.
 Emergency evacuation operation agreed
An urgent evacuation plan has been devised for migrants facing abuse in Libyan detention camps.
It was drawn up at an African Union-European Union summit in Ivory Coast.
Libya’s UN-backed administration joined the agreement, but has only limited control over the territory, raising questions about how it will work in practice.
The migrants will be sent mainly back to their home countries.
The move follows the publication of video footage that appeared to show migrants from sub-Saharan Africa being sold in Libya as slaves.
French President Emmanuel Macron called the slave auctions a “crime against humanity”.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants have crossed the Sahara and the Mediterranean trying to reach Europe.
Thousands die on the journey and those who make it arrive in Libya virtually penniless, making them vulnerable to modern-day slave traders.
Libya launched a formal investigation into migrants being sold off as farm labourers for as little as $400 (£300) after CNN broadcast footage of the slave auctions in mid-November.
Migrants trapped in Libyan detention centers have described them as “like hell”.
Nigeria had already made a unilateral move to repatriate migrants, with 240 voluntarily flown home on Tuesday night.
Speaking in Abidjan, Mr Macron said the “extreme emergency operation” had been agreed by nine countries, including Libya, France, Germany, Chad, and Niger.
Libya had reiterated its agreement “to identify the camps where barbaric scenes have been identified”, he said according to AFP news agency.
ALSO READ:Â 128 Nigerian deportees arrive from Libya
Libya’s UN-backed Prime Minister Fayez Sarraj had agreed to give the International Organization for Migration (IOM) access to the camps, where it would offer migrants the chance to be evacuated in the coming days and weeks.
“This work will be carried out in the next few days” in coordination with the countries of origin, Mr Macron said – adding that particularly at-risk migrants could be given asylum in Europe.
EU sources told AFP that humanitarian organisations, including the IOM, had already repatriated some 13,000 migrants in the last year, mainly to sub-Saharan Africa.
The AU-EU meeting also agreed on other initiatives to target traffickers, including a task force to dismantle trafficking networks and freeze assets.
But bodies including the AU and UN have accused the European Union of helping to create the conditions for migrant abuse in Libya with their policy of intercepting Europe-bound migrants and returning them to Libya.
And the IOM’s chief of mission in Libya, Othman Belbeisi, has warned smuggling networks in Libya are “getting stronger”.
and then