‘It’s a torment’: refugee tells how his family died in desert on quest for a future in Europe

Pato, from Cameroon, shows an image of his wife and daughter, who are believed to have died of thirst in the Libyan desert after the family became separated. Photograph: Mahmud Turkia/AFP/Getty Images

Pato Crepin had walked for three days through the desert and could not take it any more. Twice, he and his family tried to cross the border from Libya into Tunisia; twice, they had been pushed back. Crepin, who was recovering from an infection and had not had a drink for 24 hours, found he could not get up. In the blistering heat of the mid-July desert, his legs had given up.

His wife and six-year-old daughter, however, seemed stronger. Crepin, an asylum seeker from Cameroon, believed that if they left him behind they might yet make it to Tunisia and, from there, perhaps, on to Europe. He did not want to slow them down. “Go,” he told them. “I’ll catch up with you in Tunisia.”