IOM yesterday (17/12) helped 178 stranded Burkinabe migrants, including 2 women and 2 children, to return home to Burkina Faso from Libya. Some had spent months in immigration detention centres. The repatriation, in close cooperation with the Libyan authorities, the Burkina Faso Embassy in Tripoli and the IOM office in Burkina Faso, was on board a charter flight that departed Tripoli’s Mitiga Airport and arrived in Ouagadougou the same afternoon. Before departure, all migrants over nighted in the embassy, where IOM Libya staff provided food, drink and hygiene kits. A mobile patrol from the Tripoli Security Committee escorted the buses to Mitiga airport.Almost all of these migrants had entered Libya via Niger, paying smugglers between USD 800 and USD 1,300 for a trip that lasted anywhere from two weeks to a month. Massoud, a 33-year-old farmer said: “I paid USD 300 to smugglers in Qatrun to take me (north) to Sabha.
