‘Please help, today one person self dead by petrol because hopeless.” Sally Hayden received the text in October 2018. The Irish Times journalist was one of the few outsiders trusted by refugees locked up in Libya. The text was about Abdulaziz, who had been forced to flee his native Somalia to escape al-Shabaab, the al-Qaida-linked Islamist group waging terror in east Africa.
After a perilous journey across the desert, Abdulaziz was locked up in Triq al-Sikka, a grim prison in Tripoli, Libya. Why? Because the EU pays Libyan militias millions of euros to detain anyone deemed a possible migrant to Europe. Like many other similar prisons across Libya, Triq al-Sikka is a place of hunger, disease, beatings, rape, torture and death. Death by starvation, death by beatings, death by execution. And death by suicide.
