G., 18 years old, Eritrea

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23 November 2017

I stayed in Libia for ten months. I spent all my detention in a warehouses close to Tripoli run by a smuggler, who was a ruthless man. This man is Eritrean but he is known as Alid and helps the Libyans.

Especially Somali and Eritreans are detained- incarcerated there. I believe that people end up in this detention center due to the struggles between smugglers. It can happen then some migrants are about to leave when they get stopped by the Libyans and taken to the Walid’s detention centers .The ransom to get out from this detention is very high. Walid asks “cinqueciquanta! , that is a way here to say 55oo dollars. All these people have already paid a lot of money to smugglers to reach the sea. Eritreans and Ethiopians get different treatments. Eritreans in general are treated a bit better than Somali who are butchered. There is neither food nor water for anybody , however Somali are victims of more violence and brutality, the authors of this violence is Walid and his many men . The jailers have fun seeing us suffering. They force us to harm each other. For example, should they realize that two people are married they will make one of them beat the other as hard as possible. Otherwise, if someone is sick the jailers going closer to them would tell them: “you are neither alive nor dead, make up your mind” and then they would beat them ruthlessly until the victims decide whether to stand up and carry on living or letting themselves to die.
This testimony was gathered at the Pozzallo Hotspot on October 16th 2017

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