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Hanaa, a Sudanese girl who works gathering plastic bottles from bins to feed her youngsters, says she was kidnapped in western Libya and taken to a forest and raped at gunpoint by a gaggle of males.
The following day her attackers took her to a facility run by the state-funded Stability Help Authority (SSA). No one instructed Hanaa why she had been detained.
“Younger males and boys have been crushed and compelled to fully take away their garments whereas I used to be watching,” Hanaa tells the BBC.
“I used to be there for days. I slept on the naked ground, resting my head on my plastic slippers. They might let me go to the bathroom after hours of begging. I used to be repeatedly crushed on the top.”
There have been quite a few earlier stories of migrants from different African nations being abused in Libya. The nation is a key stepping stone on the way in which to Europe, though not one of the women the BBC spoke to deliberate to journey there.
In 2022, Amnesty Worldwide accused the SSA of “illegal killings, arbitrary detentions, interception and subsequent arbitrary detention of migrants and refugees, torture, compelled labour, and different stunning human rights violations and crimes below worldwide legislation”.
The report states that Ministry of Inside officers in the capital, Tripoli, instructed Amnesty that the ministry had no oversight over the SSA because it solutions to the prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, whose workplace didn’t reply to our request for remark.
Libya Crimes Watch has instructed the BBC that systemic sexual abuse of migrants takes place in official migrant detention centres, together with the infamous Abu Salim jail in Tripoli.
In a 2023 report, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) stated there was an “rising variety of stories of sexual and bodily violence, together with systematic strip and intimate physique searches and rape” at Abu Salim.
The inside affairs minister and the Division for Combating Unlawful Migration in Tripoli didn’t reply to our request for remark.
Salma has now left the farm moved into a brand new room with one other household close by, however she and her household nonetheless face the specter of eviction and abuse.
She says she can not return dwelling due to what occurred to her.
“I deliver disgrace on the household, they might say. I am unsure they might even welcome my lifeless physique,” she says. “If solely I had recognized what was awaiting me right here.”
