Libyan Attorney General Says Smuggling Gang Killed 38 Undocumented Migrants Near Tobruk

A shipwreck off the Libyan coast near Tobruk in eastern Libya killed 38 undocumented migrants, the Libyan Attorney General’s office announced on Monday.

“The UN refugee agency (UNHCR) has confirmed that at least 17 Sudanese refugees have drowned after a shipwreck in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast from Tobruk”

Dabanga Radio TV Online

The deaths included Egyptians, Ethiopians and Sudanese, and the office said the victims were on a dilapidated boat that sank before reaching its destination across the northern Mediterranean Sea.

Dabanga Radio TV Online

The statement described a human trafficking gang that sent migrants on an unsafe boat, and it said a prosecutor at the Tobruk Primary Court conducted a comprehensive investigation.

That investigation identified those involved in coordinating the smuggling operation and seized 300,000 Libyan dinars gained through trafficking.

The same statement said investigators also identified those responsible for illicit financial flows through unlicensed financial institutions, and it ordered the arrest of the gang members and their appearance before the prosecution.

Efforts were underway to identify the victims and notify their families, according to the office’s account.

The incident was described as the latest in a series of tragedies involving illegal immigration in the Mediterranean Sea, amid repeated warnings about unseaworthy boats and exploitation by smuggling gangs.

A separate account focused specifically on Sudanese refugees and reported a different death toll from a shipwreck off Tobruk.

Dabanga Radio TV Online said the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) confirmed that at least 17 Sudanese refugees drowned after a shipwreck in the Mediterranean off the Libyan coast from Tobruk.

Egypt Independent

It added that UNHCR said that of the 33 people known to be on board the boat, only seven survived, and nine people were still listed as missing.

The report also framed the tragedy in the context of Sudanese displacement and Libya’s role as both refuge and trap since the outbreak of war in Sudan in 2023.

It said that UNHCR reported more than 559,000 Sudanese refugees have arrived in Libya, though only a fraction are formally registered, citing “UNHCR Libya Sudanese refugee factsheet (March 2026) data.”

The same article described how people gather on Libya’s fractured coastline at dusk watching the Mediterranean, and it said some describe the sea journeys as “suicide trips” organised by smuggling networks.

In a statement via X, UNHCR said, “ending the war in Sudan and expanding safe, legal pathways are the only solutions to prevent such tragedies.”

Beyond the immediate shipwreck reports, the UN described a broader system of migrant exploitation in Libya, with testimony from migrants detained in trafficking houses.

“Thirty-eight irregular migrants have died after a boat sank off the coast of eastern Libya, the Libyan Attorney General’s Office said on Monday”

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UN News said an Eritrean woman told investigators that she was detained for more than six weeks in a trafficking house in Tobruk, in eastern Libya, and that she was “raped repeatedly, before being released after her family paid a ransom.”

The UN News account said the testimony was among nearly a hundred accounts collected by the UN, describing “a system of exploitation marked by persistent brutality against migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in the country.”

It said a report published on Tuesday by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) and the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) described abuses including murders, torture, sexual violence, human trafficking, extortion, forced labor, forced prostitution or domestic servitude.

The report described an exploitation system “deeply rooted,” where criminal networks, “sometimes linked to Libyan authorities and international circuits,” abduct, detain and exploit migrants.

It also said some migrants are separated from their families, arrested and then transferred to detention centers without due process, often under the threat of weapons, in what amounts to arbitrary detention.

UN News quoted Volker Türk, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, saying, “There are no words to describe the endless nightmare into which these people are plunged, solely to feed the growing greed of traffickers and of the people in power who profit from an exploitation system.”

The UN report also linked exploitation to Libya’s political and security fragmentation, and it used that context to frame calls for immediate action.

UN News said Libya has remained deeply fragmented since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, and it described two rival institutions: the High Council of State, based in Tripoli, and the House of Representatives, which sits in Benghazi.

Le Courrier des Balkans

It said this institutional duality reflects a broader political split, with a UN-recognized Government of National Unity led by Abdul Hamid Dbeibah in the West and a power backed by the Libyan National Army under Marshal Khalifa Haftar in the East.

In that fractured security landscape, the UN said trafficking networks find fertile ground, especially in eastern Libya, where they often escape effective control.

It also said the report notes the involvement of foreign nationals — notably Sudanese — alongside Libyan traffickers in activities mixing extortion, forced labor, sexual violence and other grave human rights abuses.

The UN News account said UNSMIL and OHCHR received information about the sale of human beings akin to slavery, particularly from centers located in Sabha and Al-Zawiya.

It then called on Libyan authorities to immediately release all arbitrarily detained people, to end trafficking, forced labor and the contemporary forms of slavery, and to ensure that those responsible are held to account, while also calling on the international community, including the European Union, to establish a moratorium on sea interceptions and returns to Libya until effective human rights guarantees are in place.

Other reporting in the provided sources placed the Tobruk tragedies within a wider pattern of migration incidents and legal proceedings across the Mediterranean and Greece.

“Libya: the UN describes a migrant-exploitation machine I would have preferred to die”

UN News

Le Courrier des Balkans’ daily feed described a December 31 shipwreck in the Aegean Sea, where a woman was found dead and an Afghan national suspected of trafficking was arrested in Samos, and it said Greek authorities and Frontex security forces launched a search-and-rescue operation that rescued about 39 passengers.

UN News

The same feed described nearly 400 migrants rescued south of Crete on December 27, with the operation conducted about 35 nautical miles south of Gavdos and about 365 asylum-seekers rescued aboard a fishing boat, supported by a Danish-flag merchant ship and a Frontex aircraft.

It also described a December 26 incident where a boy was missing at sea in the Aegean and the Greek coast guard continued the search using two ships and an air-force helicopter, while 52 asylum seekers were rescued in two separate operations on December 25.

In Crete, the feed said that on December 17 about thirty migrants, mostly Sudanese, were sentenced to prison terms up to life imprisonment by the Chania court, with ten Sudanese sentenced to ten years in prison and four Egyptians to life terms.

It further said that since the start of the year, more than 18,000 people arrived irregularly in Crete compared with a little over 5,000 in 2024, and it stated that the rise was explained by the emergence of a new maritime route that departs from eastern Libya.

The feed also said the Greek government decided to harden its stance and that in July Athens announced it would deploy three warships off Libyan waters to stop migrant boats en route to Greece.