“They came close to our boat and fired shots in the sky and in the sea.”
Mohamed and Abdul, both 22, fled Bangladesh and came to Libya to cross the Mediterranean from there. They have been imprisoned in Libya for at least 3 months after experiencing a violent & illegal pull-back by the European-funded so-called Libyan Coast Guard.
Content warning: torture, death
*To protect the persons, their names have been changed and they are not portrayed in the photos.
Bangladesh
No one can leave their family. We all love our family. We all want to live with our family. But we leave our families because we have so many problems in Bangladesh, political problems. For three months, I have not been speaking to my family. My family thinks that I’m dead.
Anyone who thinks about the past, of the problems, the beatings they suffered, is very scared.
Pull-Back
We went through many countries before we reached Libya. After a few days there, we got on a boat to go to Lampedusa. There were 130 people on the boat. We were going for 12 hours. In the middle of the sea, we came close to an oil platform and that was where the Libyan Coast Guard saw us. They came close to our boat and fired shots in the sky and in the sea. They forced us to get off the boat and took the whole boat with them. There were Bangladeshi and Pakistani people, some Iranians. There were old men, some little children and a pregnant woman. She’s going through this.
Libya
They grabbed all of us and took us back to Libya where they put us into jail. That was a very rough jail.
They put 500 people in one single cell. When they grabbed us, they took all the clothes, the bags, all the food and all our money. You only have the clothes that are on your body.
[They didn’t give us enough food.] We had one plate of pasta for a dozen people. Everyone was hungry, very hungry. We had to eat slowly. We tried to slow down the swallowing, but we couldn’t swallow properly. So, we threw up everything we ate. People got sick too. Some had a fever, an itch or other issues. There are people dying in the prison. They are dying by hunger, by sickness, they are dying by getting rotten. We had no water to take a shower and no clothes. But if anybody asks for medicine, they come with guns and they hit you. Sometimes on the face, on the chest, and they start beating you from one side to the other.
Those people, they also hit us with water pipes. The water pipe, it’s a very strong pipe and they hit us with it on the feet, under the feet, and sometimes on the head. When they hit us on the head, the water pipe sometimes broke. Imagine how hard they hit the people. They even hit the children very hard. You know, this has really happened. But now, we can continue.
Some of the people have a visa for Libya. They come here to work. But the Police grabs them without even checking their visas. They detain any Bangladeshi, anyone who looks Bangladeshi or speaks Bangla. They catch Bangladeshi people and throw them in jail. There are a lot of Bangladeshis in prison. Recently we heard the news that they shot five Bangladeshis in a prison. They shot their brains out. They killed them.
People from the UN come into the prison to check under what conditions they are keeping people inside the jail. The police then brings out 10 people from the jail to a nice room. But behind them, they are keeping 500 people in a space for 50 people. They show up all the good things to the European Union people. They never show bad things. Especially Bangladeshi people, they get tortured so much.
So, for us, it’s very tough to leave Libya [again]. The Bangladeshi embassy sometimes comes to the prison to [negotiate to] send you back to Bangladesh. But the Libyan police, they don’t want that because if you go back to Bangladesh, they would not get any money. So instead, they try to sell you. They sell all the people from the jail to other agents. They ask you to pay to get another chance to get to Italy [to cross the Mediterranean]. They ask you to pay to finally get freedom.
They torture you to get money. Especially people from Bangladesh are tortured in prison. They tie your legs together and hang you up by your legs. If someone hangs you, you can’t do anything. They hang us up, they make us naked by taking off all our clothes, and then they hit us really hard. They make a video of us that they send to our family and ask for money. Our family members see these videos. Imagine my parents, they see me naked and hanging by my feet getting hit with a pipe. So, our families they sell what they have to save their child. They sell out the small place they live in. They have nothing [left], no place to live.
[This interview was conducted by Camilla Kranzusch, Communication Coordinator, during the 11th rescue operation and translated from Bengali.]
