Inside Libya's War on Migration

 

On February 4, 2021, roughly 70 miles north of Libya, a reconnaissance plane with a camera on its underside circled a raft that was carrying a hundred desperate migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea to reach Europe. The surveillance footage from the airplane’s camera was transmitted live to an office in Warsaw, Poland, at the headquarters of Frontex, the European Union’s border patrol agency.

Two hours later, a Libyan Coast Guard cutter caught up with the migrants and ordered them to stop, even though they were well outside of Libyan waters. The armed officers took the migrants on board, beat them mercilessly, and carried them back to Libya’s gulag of detention centers. Two months later, one of the passengers, the 28-year-old Bissau Guinean and father of three Aliou Candé, was shot and killed in Libya's most notorious detention center, Al Mabani.

Though illegal under international law, the Libyan capture of migrants on the Mediterranean Sea has become commonplace in recent years as the EU has outsourced its effort to stop refugees from crossing its borders. Of course, Europe is not alone in this effort. Australia detains undocumented migrants in Papua New Guinea and Nauru. Under the Obama administration, the American government paid the Mexican government to detain undocumented people trying to enter the US. The Trump administration has since gone a big step further: shipping hundreds of undocumented people from US soil to a notoriously brutal mega-prison in El Salvador.  

Candé’s story unfolds over the first three episodes of the new season of The Outlaw Ocean Podcast, an eight-part documentary series that brings together years of reporting at sea. The first episode delves into the circumstances around Candé’s death. The second episode uncovers the EU’s complicity in the migrant crisis. The third episode provides a chilling firsthand account of the violence faced in Tripoli by the journalists reporting on Candé’s death. Season 1 of the Outlaw Ocean Podcast won a variety of awards in 2024, including the “Dan Rather Award for News and Guts” and a “Robert F. Kennedy Award for Human Rights”. Season 2 launched on June 4, 2025 in collaboration with CBC Podcasts, with one episode per week. 

For over a decade, the EU has supplied the coast guard cutters, supplies for detention centers, aerial intelligence and vehicles that the Libyans use to capture migrants crossing the Mediterranean hoping for a better life. Efficient and brutal, the at-sea capture and internment of these migrants in prisons in and around Tripoli is what European Union officials hail as part of a successful partnership with Libya in their “humanitarian rescue” efforts across the Mediterranean. But the true intent of this joint campaign, according to many human rights advocates, legal experts and members of the European Parliament, is less to save migrants from trafficking or drowning than to stop them from reaching European shores.

An MSF crewmember watches a Libyan Coast Guard boat cut across the bow of a rescue ship (Ed Ou / Outlaw Ocean Project)

Though the Libyan Coast Guard routinely opens fire on migrant rafts, has been tied by the U.N. to human trafficking and murder and is now run by militias, it continues to draw strong E.U. support. Since at least 2017, the E.U., led by Italy, has trained and equipped the Libyan Coast Guard to serve as a proxy maritime force, whose central purpose is to stop migrants from reaching European shores. 

As part of a broader investigation, a reporter for The Outlaw Ocean joined a five-week stint on a Doctors Without Borders ship conducting at-sea search-and-rescue work on the Mediterranean looking to save the lives of migrants crossing the sea from Africa to Europe. The work is a life-or-death race. While the humanitarian ship tries to rescue migrants and take them to safety in Europe, the far faster, bigger and more aggressive Libyan Coast Guard ships try to get to them first so they can instead arrest them and return them to prisons in Libya. Europe has long denied playing an active role in this effort but the reporters filmed drones operated by Frontex, Europe’s border agency, that are used by Europe to alert the Libyans to the exact location of migrant rafts. 

“[Frontex] has never engaged in any direct cooperation with Libyan authorities.” the Frontex press office said in a statement, in response to requests for comment on the investigation. But a mounting body of evidence collected by European journalists and nongovernmental organizations suggested Frontex’s involvement with the Libyan authorities was neither accidental nor limited. In 2020, for instance, Lighthouse Reports, a Dutch nonprofit journalism organization, documented 20 instances in which Frontex aircraft were in the vicinity of migrant boats later captured by the Libyan Coast Guard. In a dozen of those cases, Lighthouse determined, Frontex was the first to identify the boats, meaning that under international law, it was obliged to notify not just the Libyan Coast Guard, but the nearest vessel — government or commercial — so that a rescue might be promptly undertaken.

Aside from the EU role in helping Libyan capture migrants at sea, the United Nations as well as humanitarian and human rights groups have roundly criticized European authorities for its role in creating and subsidizing a gulag of brutal migrant prisons in Libya. The EU has provided Libya with coast guard cutters, SUVs, and buses for moving captured migrants to prison.  

For the E.U., the challenge of how best to handle desperate migrants fleeing hardships in their native countries will only grow in coming years. Climate change is expected to displace 150 million people across the globe in the next 50 years. Rising seas, desertification, famine promises to drive desperate people to global north countries like the US and those in Europe, testing the moral character and political imagination of these wealthier nations.

These factors were especially palpable for Aliou Candé, who grew up on a farm near the remote village of Sintchan Demba Gaira, Guinea-Bissau, a place without many of the basics of plumbing or electricity. Candé had a reputation as a dogged worker, who avoided trouble of any kind. “People respected him,” his brother Jacaria said.

But the 28 year old would become a climate migrant— droughts in Guinea-Bissau had become more common and longer; flooding became more unpredictable and damaging; Candé’s crops—cassava, mangoes, and cashews—were failing and his children were hungry. Milk production from his cows was so meager, his children were allowed to drink it once a month. The shift in climate had made for more mosquitos, and with them more disease. He believed there was only one way to improve their conditions: to go to Europe. His brothers had done it. His family encouraged him to try. 

In the late summer of 2019, he set out for Europe with six hundred Euros. He told his wife he was not sure how long he’d be away, but he did his best to be optimistic. “I love you,” he told her, “and I’ll be back.” In January 2020, he arrived in Morocco, where he tried to pay for a passage on a boat to Spain, but learned that the price was three thousand Euros, much more than he had. 

Candé then headed to Libya, where he could book a cheaper raft to Italy. In February 2021, he and more than a hundred other migrants pushed off from the Libyan shore aboard an inflatable rubber raft. After their boat was detected by the Libyan Coast Guard, the migrants were taken back to land, loaded by armed guards into buses and trucks, and driven to Al Mabani, which is Arabic for “the buildings.”

Candé was not charged with a crime or allowed to speak to a lawyer, and he was given no indication of how long he’d be detained. In his first days there, he kept mostly to himself, submitting to the grim routines of the place. The prison is controlled by a militia that euphemistically calls itself the Public Security Agency, and its gunmen patrolled the hallways.

Cells were so crowded that the detainees had to sleep in shifts. In a special room, guards hung migrants upside from ceiling beams and beat them. In an audio message recorded on a hidden cell phone, Candé made a plea to his family to send the ransom for his release.

In the early hours of April 8, 2021, he was shot to death when the guards fired into a cellblock of detainees after a fight. His death went uninvestigated, his killer unpunished. Aliou Candé wound up buried in an overcrowded migrant cemetery in Tripoli, more than 2,000 miles from his family in Guinea-Bissau.

One month after Candé’s death, a team of four reporters traveled to Libya to investigate. Almost no Western journalists are permitted to enter Libya, but, with the help of an international aid group, they were granted visas.

Initially, Libyan officials said the team could visit Al Mabani, but after a week in Tripoli it became clear that this would not happen. So the journalists found a hidden spot on a side street, half-mile from the detention center, and launched a small drone. The drone made it to the facility unnoticed, and captured close-ups of the prison’s open courtyard. The team also interviewed dozens of migrants who had been imprisoned with Candé at the same detention center.

A week into the investigation, the lead reporter, speaking with his wife from his hotel room in Tripoli, heard a knock at the door. Upon opening it, he was confronted by a dozen armed men who stormed into the room. He was immediately forced to the ground, a gun pressed to his forehead, and a hood placed over his head. What followed was a violent assault. The journalist sustained broken ribs, facial injuries, and internal trauma after being kicked repeatedly.

Other members of the team - including an editor, photographer, and filmmaker - were also detained. The group was blindfolded, separated, and interrogated for hours at a time. Under Libyan law, authorities may detain foreign nationals indefinitely without formal charges.

The U.S. State Department became involved after the journalist's wife, who had heard the commotion over the phone, raised the alarm. American officials quickly identified the detaining authority and began negotiating for the team's release.

After six days in custody, the team was unexpectedly told they were free to leave. No formal charges were filed, and no official explanation for their detention was provided. They were lucky. The experience—deeply frightening but mercifully short—offered a glimpse into the world of indefinite detention in Libya.

With no explanation from the government, fanfare by aid groups, nor coverage by domestic or foreign media, Libya’s most notorious migrant prison, Al Mabani, officially closed on January 13, 2022. In its roughly 12-month lifespan, the prison became emblematic of the unaccountable nature of Libya’s broader detention system.

The quiet shuttering of Al Mabani shows the ever-shifting nature of incarceration in Libya and how such transience makes protection of detainees nearly impossible. Migrant detention centers open, close, and reopen from one week to the next. Detainees are moved with little tracking. Three thousand people are taken from one prison and, mysteriously, only 2,500 of them get off the bus at the next. It takes months for aid workers to get permission for regular visits to prisons like Al Mabani—only to have to start these negotiations over again when these detainees get to a newly created prison. The consequence: militias can, with confident impunity, disappear, torture and detain refugees indefinitely.

In the same month that Al Mabani was closed, the team behind the reporting presented details of their investigation to the European Parliament’s human rights committee, and outlined the E.U.’s extensive support to Libya’s migration control apparatus. European Commission representatives took issue with the reporters’ characterization of the crisis. “We are not funding the war against migrants,” said Rosamaria Gili, the Libya country director at the European External Action Service. “We are trying to instill a culture of human rights.”

And yet, just a week later, Henrike Trautmann, a representative of the European Commission, told lawmakers that the E.U. was going to provide five more vessels to the Libyan Coast Guard to bolster its ability to intercept migrants on the high seas.

“We know the Libyan context is far from optimal for this,” Trautmann conceded. “We think it’s still preferable to continue to support this than to leave them to their own devices.” 

Meanwhile, the flow of migrants across the Mediterranean continues. At least two thousand migrants died in 2024 while making this perilous passage, according to the UN, and, during the same period, the Libyan Coast Guard captured an additional twenty thousand that they brought back to prisons like Al Mabani in and around Tripoli. In February of this year, Libyan authorities held a training exercise with the EU border officials. 

The Trump administration has also taken note: in May, floating the idea of sending undocumented migrants from the US to Libya. The administration also held discussions in May with Libyan officials, according to NBC News, about permanently relocating up to a million Palestinians from the Gaza Strip to Libya. 

The status of both of those plans remains unclear.

Marcella Boehler is global publishing editor at The Outlaw Ocean Project, a non-profit journalism organization based in Washington D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment and labor concerns on the two thirds of the planet covered by water. Season Two of The Outlaw Ocean Project's podcast series may be found here.