The untold story

Ticket of Death

Love letters, prayer beads and a sandal – lives washed up on a
Libyan beach - photo essay by Mohamed Ben Khalifa

Note: the essay contains graphic images

 In October , 2 , 2014 , I received a phone call from a friend who works with the Red Crescent in Zuwarah, my hometown, on Libya’s Mediterranean coast. “Come, the sea is rough today. The beach is full of bodies.” I took my camera and headed to the beach.


My town, 180 miles across the sea from the Italian Island of Lampedusa, had become a meeting point between people traffickers and [?thousands]hundreds of desperate Syrians and people from across Africa continent trying to reach Europe.

That day, disaster had struck. My friend was right. The coastline wasstrewn with the bodies of dozens of men and women who had drowned when one of the traffickers’ boats sank a short way offshore. Libyan Red Crescent volunteers were doing what they could to recover the bodies and collect any possessions which could identify the victims. I took photos. I spoke to some of the survivors and recorded an interview with three of them, all Syrians. But I have few contacts in the international
media, and it took six months before migrant deaths started to interest Europe. The story is still fresh, though: almost every day, the Libyan Red Crescent volunteers recover bodies from our beaches as more and more migrants are lost at sea.








One of the Syrian survivors told me the small fishing boat had set out a fewdays before the big Muslim festival of Eid Al Adha at 1.15am. {the Red Crescent said it had 260 people on board and survivors said they included about 50 children. They said that seven kilometers out to sea, the boat
began to take on water. The two Tunisian crew radioed the trafficker to say the boat was sinking and giving him the position. The trafficker promised to send a rescue boat right away ….. and they should stay where they were. But the rescue never arrived. One of the Syrians said only about 120 survived, rescued by Libyan coastguards from Zuwarah alerted to the tragedy by a passing boat.




“Those who bought a life jacket from the smuggler for $70 managedto stay afloat. Those who did not know how to swim drowned,” said one of the rescued Syrians. None of them wanted their full names


published:

The bodies washed up on the shore near the port from which the boat embarked. Red Crescent workers acted as quickly as they could to clear them from the beach. International media reports have concentrated on Italian coastguards rescuing migrants from the sea. But I would like the world to know that Libyans, too, have done what they can to help. The men and women of the Red Crescent in Libya volunteered immediately to recover the bodies and care for survivors. And I hope my photos will show that the Africans and Syrians willing to risk their lives for a chance to escape war and starvation are human beings too.


Note:- those photos are under AP's copyrights, please find them in the link below

 http://www.apimages.com/Search?query=ap+mohamed+ben+khalifa+&ss=10&st=kw&entitysearch=&toItem=18&orderBy=Newest&searchMediaType=allmedia

 

The remains of the boat. Usually the boats are crewed by Tunisians,paid about 8,000 Libyan dinars ($ 6,000) per trip. This boat,according to survivors, was crewed by a Tunisian captain and his assistant. They survived – and the other survivors handed them over to the coastguard.

A body of a Syrian woman, Layla. All she had with her was a plastic bag containing passports and a handful of love letters between her and her husband.

According to the the documents, Layla was married. Her husband was called Ammar and they had a 5 year-old daughter, Hana.

,“Yesterday it was just a feeling. Today it became true. It became the only love that filled my heart, and mind. Will it continue?” says one of love letters which Layla wrote to Ammar ، Ammar was one of the 120 rescued. Red Crescent volunteers said he recognized his wife when her photo was published on Zuwara’s media canter Facebook page. His daughter’s body (Hana) was one of the first bodies floated in Zuwara beach and it was easily recognised

The body of an African woman, name unknown. Usually, the migrants from Africa take no identification papers with them to make it harder to deport them back to their homeland if they are caught in Italy

A body of a Syrian woman caught in seaweed. One of the hardest locations for Red Crescent workers to reach is among the seaweed. If the bodies catch there, they can take a long time to find. By the time they are recovered, they will be often have decomposed and be harder to identify.

The body of an African man wearing a sandal on his arm. It seems that when he went into the sea, he was hoping he would make it to the shore.

One of the Red Crescent volunteers found a set of brown prayer beads in the pocket of a Syrian man’s body when he was putting it into a body bag. He remembered that an 11 year-old Syrian girl who survived told him her father had been carrying brown prayer beads. The daughter is now living with an Algerian family and they are trying to contact her family back in
Syria.

Clothes and shoes washed up on the beach.

Body of a Syrian man lying on Zuwarah’s beach. Most of the refugees wear many layers of clothes to keep warm during the night journey at sea. One survivor said the migrants are often shuttled from one location to another in Libya before setting out, never spending more than a day or two in one place. A few days before the trip, they are locked in one location. “You are imprisoned,” one survivor said.

body of an African woman . Often the sea strips the clothes from bodies.

Sometimes Red Crescent volunteers don't even have surgical gloves and are forced to use old plastic bags.

The body of a Syrian woman. Recovering the bodies took more than three days, working late into the night. The Red Crescent volunteers tried to remove the bodies as quickly as possible, before they decomposed and cleaning them and identifying them became more difficult.

The Red Crescent in Zuwarah has very limited resources. They have only one four-wheel-drive vehicle so they use their own cars. Here, volunteers are trying to push one of their colleague’s personal cars out of the sand.

The Red Crescent owns just one four-wheel-drive vehicle, which is used to transport the bodies. When residents of Zuwarah see this green car, they know it carries death.

The last step before burial is when the coroner takes DNA samples from the bodies in the hope that one day they can be identified.