Laure Giuily
As the scandal over the release of Libyan warlord Almasri continues to shake Italy, survivors of Libya’s migrant detention camps—now under international protection in Rome—are exposing prison horrors and urge Europe to take responsibility.
On Jan. 19, Lam Magok, a native of southern Sudan, felt a glimmer of hope for the first time in his life. He believed that Osama Almasri Najim—the man who had tortured him repeatedly— would finally face justice after being arrested in Italy.
But that hope quickly turned to bitter anger. Despite an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court (ICC), two days later, the militiaman—leader of Rada forces, one of Libya’s most dangerous armed groups, and former director of the infamous Mitiga prison in Tripoli—was sent back to Libya on a plane chartered by the Italian government. Italian taxpayers footed the bill.
“I was imprisoned, tortured, I saw people executed, I collected corpses,” Lam said in a low voice, his eyes dark. “By releasing this criminal, the Italian government has made me a victim a second time,” the survivor confided. “It’s as if they’ve given Libyan militias a license to kill refugees.”
Days later, Rome’s public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into “aiding an escape” against Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and her interior and justice ministers, Matteo Piantedosi and Carlo Nordio. Lam Magok also filed a lawsuit against the prime minister and her ministers on the same charges—as a direct victim.
Six attempts to cross
Lam fled southern Sudan eight years ago. It was 2017. He left behind his parents and seven siblings in a country torn by civil war. A few months later, his father died on the frontlines.
On his journey to Europe, Lam first stopped in Egypt, then decided to work in Libya. At the border, he was kidnapped and forced into slavery in the desert, working for Libyan families.
He managed to escape and reached Tripoli, where he found work in construction to save money for passage to Italy. Six times, he tried to cross the Mediterranean. Each time, he was turned back by Libya’s so-called “coast guard”—in reality, militias.
After his last attempt, despite holding a refugee card issued by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), he was sentenced to three months in Jedida prison in Tripoli. Then, without explanation, he was sent for six more months to Mitiga—Libya’s “Guantanamo”—run by Almasri.
The brutality inside these prisons is unimaginable for those living on the safe side of the Mediterranean.
Packed into a hangar with 500 others, detainees slept on top of one another—either on the ground or on makeshift mattresses. Some were selected in the morning for forced labor. Others were forced, depending on their jailers’ whims, to collect the corpses of fellow inmates, endure hours of torture, or listen to executions. Many were beaten with bats or electrocuted with cables.
UNHCR under fire
After multiple escape attempts, Lam finally broke free from Mitiga and returned to Tripoli. In the fall of 2020, outside UNHCR’s headquarters in the Libyan capital, he met another Sudanese refugee—his former cellmate from Jedida and Mitiga—David Yambio.
More than 5,000 migrants, mostly from sub-Saharan Africa and survivors of torture camps, gathered outside the UN building, desperate for protection. Lam and David also met Mahamat, a Darfur native who had fled Sudan at 17 and spent eight years trying to reach Europe via Libya.
The three men decided to take action, forming the group Refugees in Libya, which they still lead today.
“We wrote down the names of every refugee outside the UNHCR building and submitted them to the organization’s council. We decided to stage a sit-in in front of the building until our voices were heard,” Mahamat recalls.
The sit-in lasted more than three months. Eventually, the UN agency asked Libyan authorities to intervene.
One morning in January 2021, police arrested thousands of demonstrators and threw them into prison. Mahamat was sent back to Ain-Zara detention center. David and Lam managed to escape and hide.
After two years on the run, with help from several Italian organizations, Lam was granted refugee status and flown to Rome.
Alice Basiglini, vice president of the Baobab Experience, an organization that helps refugees upon arrival in Rome and provided Lam with housing, said his story is tragically common.
“In countries like Libya and Tunisia, UNHCR offers little to no protection and is powerless because it depends heavily on local interior ministries,” Basiglini lamented.
She insisted that Italy and the EU must stop working with these governments. “The EU must take a clear stance against border outsourcing, and the agreements signed between Italy and Libya in 2017 must end immediately.”
That memorandum—signed under then-Prime Minister Matteo Renzi—funded Libya’s coast guard to prevent migrants from crossing.
“We know full well that these so-called coast guards are militias. With this deal, Italy is financing dangerous organizations like Almasri’s—and we’re also funding prisons that were originally supposed to be transit centers,” Basiglini says.
‘We need to make our cause known’
After the Tripoli crackdown, Mahamat’s ordeal was far from over.
After escaping a Libyan prison, he crossed Algeria and reached Morocco. There, he survived the Melilla massacre on June 24, 2022, when at least 30 sub-Saharan migrants died while trying to scale an 18-meter fence between Morocco and the Spanish enclave of Melilla. Survivors were sent back to Morocco.
Undeterred, Mahamat eventually made it to Tunisia and crossed to Lampedusa in August 2023. A few days later, he arrived in Rome.
A year and a half later, he is still waiting for refugee status—the key to working legally and moving freely.
“I still have many obstacles to overcome, but for the first time, I feel at home and safe,” he said.
“I will never forget what happened—I have to live with it. But I survived. Now, I can finally start living.”
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