42 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER6, 2021
dinghy along its route using a compass.
A “captain” manned the motor and han-
dled the satellite phone; once they were
far enough from Libya, he was supposed
to call Alarm Phone, a migration activ-
ist group, and request a rescue. A “com-
mander” kept order and made sure no
one touched the plug that, if pulled,
would deflate the vessel. Soon, the seas
grew rough, making nearly everyone
sick and turning the pooling water at
their feet into a soup of vomit, feces,
candy wrappers, and baguette crumbs.
Several migrants tried to bail out the
boat using plastic water bottles cut in
half. A fight erupted, and someone
threatened to slash the dinghy with a
knife before he was subdued. Mohamed
David Soumahoro, who befriended
Candé on the boat, recalled, “Everyone
started calling out for their God—one
for Allah, the other calling Jesus, an-
other calls this one and another that
one. Women began crying, and once
they saw people panicking the babies
began crying, too.”
At dawn, the waters calmed, and the
migrants, deciding that they were far
enough from Libya, called Alarm Phone
for help. A volunteer told them that
there was a merchant vessel not far
away. This sparked jubilation. “Bosa,
free, bosa, free,” the migrants chanted,
using a celebratory Fula expression.
Candé turned to Soumahoro, his eyes
lighting up, and said, “Inshallah, we ’re
going to make it! Italy!” But when the
merchant vessel arrived the captain an-
nounced that he had no lifeboats and
quickly steered away.
By now, Candé’s boat was seventy
miles from Tripoli, out of Libyan wa-
ters but still within the Coast Guard’s
expanded jurisdiction. Around 5 P.M.
on February 4th, the migrants noticed
an airplane overhead, which circled
for fifteen minutes, then flew away.
Data from the ADS-B Exchange, an
organization that tracks aviation traf-
fic, show that the plane was the Eagle1,
a white Beech King Air 350 surveil-
lance aircraft leased by Frontex. (The
agency declined to comment on its
role in the capture.) About three hours
later, a boat appeared on the horizon.
“The closer it came, the clearer we
saw it—and saw the black and green
lines of the flag,” Soumahoro told me.
“Everyone started crying and holding
their heads, saying, ‘Shit, it’s Libyan.’”
The boat, a Vittoria P350 made of
steel, fibreglass, and Kevlar, was one of
the cutters unveiled by the E.U. It
rammed the dinghy three times, then
Coast Guard officers ordered the mi-
grants to climb aboard. “Move!” they
yelled. One hit several of the migrants
with the butt of his rif le; anotherwhipped them with a rope. The mi-
grants were taken back to land, loaded
into buses and trucks, and driven to
Al Mabani.W
hen I got to Libya, government
officials told me that I would be
allowed to tour Al Mabani. But after
several days it became clear that this
would not happen. Late one afternoon,
my team and I went to an alley and
launched a small video drone, flying
it high enough over the prison so that
it would not be noticed by the guards.
On the monitor, I saw them prepar-
ing to march the migrants from the
courtyard back into their cells. Roughly
sixty-five detainees sat in a corner, un-
moving, heads down, legs folded, each
man’s hands touching the back of the
man in front of him. When one man
glanced to the side, a guard struck him
on the head.
Under Libyan law, unauthorized for-
eigners—including economic migrants,
asylum seekers, and the victims of ille-
gal trafficking—can be detained indefi-
nitely, with no access to a lawyer. There
are currently some fifteen recognized de-
tention centers in the country, of which
Al Mabani is the largest. An I.O.M. of-
ficial told me that tens of thousands of
migrants have been held in the deten-
tion centers since 2017. Earlier this year,
six women who had been held at a cen-
ter called Shara’ al-Zawiya told investi-
gators from Amnesty International that
women there had been raped or sub-
jected to other forms of sexual violence.
At Abu Salim, at least two migrants werekilled during an escape attempt this past
February. “Death in Libya, it’s normal:
no one will look for you, and no one will
find you,” a migrant there told Amnesty
investigators. Diana Eltahawy, who works
on North African issues at Amnesty In-
ternational, declared in July, “The entire
network of Libyan migration detention
centres is rotten to its core.”
Migrants captured by the Coast
Guard are loaded onto buses, many sup-
plied by the E.U., and brought to the
detention centers; sometimes Coast
Guard units sell them to the centers.
But some migrants never make it there.
In the first seven months of 2021, ac-
cording to the I.O.M., more than fif-
teen thousand migrants were captured
by the Libyan Coast Guard and other
authorities, but by the end of that pe-
riod only about six thousand were being
held in designated facilities. Federico
Soda, the I.O.M.’s chief of mission in
Libya, believes that migrants are disap-
pearing into “unofficial” facilities run by
traffickers and militias, where aid groups
have no access. “The numbers simply
don’t add up,” he said.
Al Mabani was created early this
year under the supervision of Emad al-
Tarabulsi, a senior leader in the Public
Security Agency militia. The group has
links to the Zintan tribe, which helped
overthrow Qaddafi and held his son
Seif prisoner for years. Today, the mi-
litia is aligned with the National Unity
government, and Tarabulsi briefly served
as its deputy head of intelligence. He
built the prison in a corner of the city
controlled by the militia and selected
Noureddine al-Ghreetly, a soft-spoken
commander, to run it. (Tarabulsi could
not be reached for comment.)
Previously, Ghreetly oversaw a mi-
grant prison called Tajoura, near a mil-
itary base on the eastern outskirts of
Tripoli. In a 2019 Human Rights Watch
report, six detainees there, including
two sixteen-year-old boys, described
being severely beaten, and one woman
said that she’d been repeatedly sexually
assaulted. The report’s authors recounted
seeing a female detainee attempting to
hang herself. Prisoners were forced to
do labor at the facility, including clean-
ing weapons, storing ammunition, and
offloading military shipments, accord-
ing to U.N. investigators. In July, 2019,
during the latest outbreak of civil war,