The Libyan rescue services located this Wednesday the bodies of 20 migrants who died two weeks earlier in the southern desert, bordering Chad, due to high temperatures and lack of water, the spokesman for the Emergency Services and Ambulance, Osama Ali.
According to this source, the deceased were found around a truck that could have suffered a breakdown 300 kilometers south of the oasis city of Kufra (southeast), where they will be transferred for burial and which will be supervised by local authorities.
The Missing Migrants Project, carried out by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), has recorded nearly 2,000 deaths in the Sahara desert since 2014, although, it points out, it is an “insufficient” count due to the lack of official data and the vast area it represents.
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The North African country has become a transit territory for thousands of migrants fleeing war and poverty in Africa and the Middle East, mostly through the Central Mediterranean route – considered the deadliest in the world – with the in order to reach European shores.
According to the IOM, so far this year at least 9,340 people – 342 of them minors – have been returned to the country despite being classified by humanitarian organizations as “not safe”, while 156 have died and 565 have disappeared.
