Refugee crisis in Libya: Migrants rescued at sea shot dead by UN aid workers

In front of Uno employees, a migrant from Sudan has been shot dead in Libya. The UN Organization for Migration (IOM) and the refugee agency UNHCR strongly condemned the incident.

It is new evidence that the civil war country Libya is not a safe country and migrants under any circumstances should be returned there, said a UNHCR spokesman in Geneva. Such a tragedy was only a matter of time, said IOM spokesman Leonard Doyle.

The man was in a group of more than 100 people who had intercepted the Coast Guard in the attempted escape to Europe and returned to Libya, reported an IOM spokeswoman.

Local Libyan media had reported earlier this week that the country's Coast Guard had returned a total of 300 migrants from three boats back to Libya over the weekend. With reference to the Libyan Coast Guard it was said that the ships were 80, 55 and 44 nautical miles from the coast. Whether the dead Sudanese belonged to these people is unclear.

The IOM said that the people of the group to which the Sudanese belonged had resisted because they were to be sent to a detention center. IOM helpers were on the ground, who shot the incident in the military area Abusitta in the capital Tripoli, was unclear, said the spokeswoman.

The EU is under growing criticism from human rights defenders for supporting the Libyan Coast Guard to intercept migrants and bring them back to shore. According to UN organizations, inhumane conditions prevail in the Libyan internment camps.

The people are penned, are hardly supplied and violence is the order of the day. Two months ago, 53 migrants were killed in an airstrike on a detention center in Tajura in the east of the capital, Tripoli.