“Sudanese traffickers call me and we agree on a place to receive the passengers, which is also where we wrap up the buying and selling process,” said M.F. “Then I sell the migrants to other people who then sell them again at a point close to the coast. This process continues until the migrants reach Europe.”

M. F. is 33 and grew up in a poor family in al-Kufra, in the southeast of Libya. When his father passed away five years ago, M.F. became responsible for his three-member family, made up of three brothers, one of whom is physically disabled. 

“Sudanese traffickers call me and we agree on a place to receive the passengers, which is also where we wrap up the buying and selling process,” said M.F. “Then I sell the migrants to other people who then sell them again at a point close to the coast. This process continues until the migrants reach Europe.”

M. F. is 33 and grew up in a poor family in al-Kufra, in the southeast of Libya. When his father passed away five years ago, M.F. became responsible for his three-member family, made up of three brothers, one of whom is physically disabled. 

M. F. said he is obliged to make money regardless of the means. “I live in a border area and I know the desert surrounding my city,” he said. “This kind of work is very tempting and profitable.” M.F. is a government employee who works in the agricultural sector but like many other young men in Libya, he earns a modest salary without actually working.

Worth the risk

“I never thought about the consequences of this business,” he said, adding that he  was arrested many times by the army and the anti-illegal immigration forces, but it was very easy for him to escape from prison. “When I can’t escape, I serve my time, pay a fine and then I’m free again. There are no strict laws criminalizing human trafficking,” he said.

Most trafficking operations in the desert take three days, during which time M.F. faces an unknown fate. He knows what he’s doing is against the law and he regularly puts his own life at risk. In one operation, he carried the corpses of his passengers after his car crashed trying to escape from police. Despite all this, M.F. justifies the risks.

A thriving business

For the people living in the area, news of the arrest of illegal immigrants in the vicinity of the Kufra has become all too common.

On April 29 the al-Kufra Operations Group, the military group charged with protecting and securing the border near the Owaynat border, stopped several Toyota cars carrying more than 500 illegal immigrants. They were handed over to the joint force of the State of Sudan while they were on their way to the al-Karb area in Sudan.

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The death of a dream

One of those migrants was a 28-year-old Eritrean newlywed named Jaber, who was placed in an immigration detention center in al-Kufra in August 2013.

Jaber told Correspondents that he sold the only piece of land he owned, in the city of Asmara. His mother wanted Jaber to cultivate the land, but he sold it to pay for his journey to the “land of bliss.” All of his money went to traffickers like M.F.

Jaber paid US $500 for the first and second phase of his journey, which started from one of the areas in northern Sudan to the Libyan borders. 

A tragic end

In the third phase of the journey, there were 20 other passengers accompanying Jaber and his wife. They were all riding in a Toyota, driven by a Sudanese driver who took them to a border area between Sudan and Libya known as “the migrant selling area.”  Here the migrants were sold to one of the Libyan traffickers.

The Libyan trafficker made each of them pay an amount of US $500 to take them to another area but they never reached their destination. One of the immigration office’s security patrols backed by six armed cars chased the traffickers’ cars to an area 120 kilometers east of al-Kufra near the Egyptian borders adjacent to the Abdul Malik Mountains.

The force continued to chase the three cars used by the traffickers in the desert, each was carrying 22-25 passengers form different nationalities, for almost four hours. In the end, it was able to stop two cars but the third overturned. Jaber and his wife were in that car.

More than seven passengers died and the rest were injured, Jaber and his wife were among them. They were immediately taken to a hospital in al-Kufra to receive treatment, but Nimara, Jaber’s wife took her last breath the moment she arrived. Her unborn baby also died. She was buried, with others like her, in a special cemetery for illegal migrants in al-Kufra.

Jaber has been treated from his wounds and a fracture in his right hand and he was sent to a prison for illegal immigrants. After losing his wife, child, land and all of his money, he was deported back to his country.

Another dangerous stop

Dr. Walid Hamdi, who works at the al-Kufra hospital and who was responsible for treating the injured persons who arrived on that day said that the hospital received more than 20 injured people.

“Among the injured and dead persons, there was one who was infected with hepatitis, a dangerous liver disease, which is widely spread among illegal migrants, who are considered as the main source of this disease in Libya,” Hamdi said. 

After medical examinations, arrested people are sent to the city’s immigration office.   Muhammad Fadeel, the head of this office, said: “We gather immigrants here until we arrange their deportation procedures and we send them back to their countries.” 

Impossible to put out of business

According to al-Fadeel, when Libyan traffickers get arrested, they are put in prison for three days and then they get transferred to the Public Prosecution, which sends them to the al-Kufiya Prison, the main prison in Benghazi, to serve the imprisonment period specified by the judge. The authorities confiscate the cars used in trafficking and traffickers pay a fine, the amount of which is decided by the court.

Al-Fadeel believes that the government is not exerting enough effort against illegal immigration. “It is supposed to make more efforts to reduce the incidents of illegal immigration and control the borders, especially in the south, which overlooks the three countries: Egypt, Sudan and Chad, in order to specify the area where traffickers are active and to arrest them.”

While Al-Fadeel hopes to receive more government support in order to arrest traffickers, M. F. says the threat of punishment is not enough to make him stop.