According to the humanitarian ship Louise Michel, present in the Mediterranean Sea, the Libyan coast guard fired on a migrant who was trying to escape by jumping into the water. The aid ship, which witnessed the incident, did not find the migrant targeted by the shots.
The humanitarian ship Louise Michel, financed by the artist Banksy, witnessed a new violent incident in the Mediterranean Sea. On Wednesday, January 19, alerted by the Alarm Phone monitoring platform, the boat headed for a boat in distress to help it. “We were quite far away, we sped off at full speed and took two hours to reach the position,” explains Marie, a member of the crew, to InfoMigrants.
Around 4 p.m., when Louise Michel arrived, the rescuers spotted the presence of a Libyan coast guard boat. “They were around the dinghy. They must also have received the distress message [relayed by Alarm Phone] because several Frontex drones are operating in the area,” she continues.
“The coast guard started putting people on their boat […] We decided to stay away in order to prevent the migrants from jumping into the water. Yet at least one person jumped desperately into the boat. water and tried to swim to our ship,” she said.
That’s when the Libyan Coast Guard fired. The Louise Michel therefore retreated. “They made sure that no one would follow this example by shooting,” said another rescuer interviewed by the activist blog The civil fleet.
“We found no one in the water”
Impossible to know if the target person was hit. She did not, in any case, succeed in reaching Louise Michel. “After the Libyans left, we returned to our first position. We didn’t find anyone in the water. We just saw an abandoned, deflated inflatable boat,” Marie said.
“The fact that a civilian rescue vessel was once again obstructed in its mission by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard has left us speechless. It shows once again that NGOs alone will never be able to fill the void voluntarily created by the EU in terms of rescue,” she continues. “At European borders, some lives just don’t matter.”
This is not the first time that the Libyans have used their firearms against migrants at sea. Fishermen present in the area, particularly off the coast of Tunisia, told InfoMigrants that shooting by the Libyans was commonplace towards the frail boats.
32,000 people intercepted at sea and brought back to Libya in 2021
Recently, in July 2021, the Libyan coastguard had used their weapons off Lampedusa. The scene, filmed by the organization from its Seabird surveillance plane, shows a Libyan boat approaching very close to a wooden boat, and firing live ammunition into the water.
Humanitarian ships also suffered numerous attacks. In November 2021, the Libyan authorities had urged the crew of Sea-Watch 4 in a threatening tone to leave the rescue zone. And threatened “to take” the crew “to Libya”.
According to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), 32,425 migrants were intercepted trying to cross the Mediterranean in 2021 and brought back to Libya, the country they seek to flee. This is almost three times more than in 2020.
Last July, Italy, with the support of the EU, renewed its financial and material support to the Libyan Coast Guard, with the aim of stopping migrant boats. Rome notably provided them with speedboats. According to a report by the NGO Oxfam, “a total of 32.6 million euros have been allocated to the Libyan Coast Guard since 2017”, the date of the signing of the first agreement between Italy and Libya.
