TRIPOLI – After six months in prison, Commander Bija is free. The most feared man trafficker in official uniform, the infamous Bija against whom the United Nations has sanctioned the most serious crimes against the rights of migrants fleeing to European coasts, was released by the General Prosecutor of Tripoli for lack of evidence .
A mockery that unfortunately tells how the attempt to introduce minimum standards of judicial responsibility is a process that can hardly stand on the sand of the institutional desert created by wars, feuds and revolutions that have exhausted Libya. Bija, better known as Abd al-Rahman Milad, head of the militia of the important coastal city of Zawiya, a few kilometers west of Tripoli, was arrested in October after a video was released in which he sided with the then head of the government Fayez al Serraj versus Fathi Bashaga, the prime minister of the time.
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Milad had ended up in the eye of the storm after a series of journalistic inquiries that had exposed his role in migrant trafficking. As head of the militias of Zawiya, one of the large hubs of the Libyan coast from which small boats and rafts sail, on board his lookout with coast guard functions he was accused of directing the smuggling of migrants deciding, on the basis of agreements with smugglers, to whom to leave the green light and which ones to stop, taking those captured to illegal detention camps where terrifying violence has been witnessed.
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This, at least, according to the accusations witnessed by various journalistic inquiries. The same cannot be said of the law. If on the basis of those investigations the UN Security Council had already sanctioned Bija in 2018, easily recognizable in the videos of some of his militia’s exploits for a hand injured by the explosion of a grenade, in the complex years of the war with the Serraj government. , the commander had had free play to continue managing illicit trafficking alongside the lawful tasks. The arrest had only come in October 2020.
In addition to being a nerve center for human trafficking, Zawiya is also an important oil center: here is the only existing refinery in Libya. Despite being a country very rich in hydrocarbons, the rest of the gasoline arrives from the other side of the Mediterranean, mostly from the Sardinian Moratti refineries. Paradoxically, Libya largely depends on foreign countries for gasoline supplies, and the refinery is therefore of decisive importance. As head of Zawiya’s militia, Bija also had access to financing for the protection of the refinery. In short, he received official money to guarantee the safety of the department, of the refinery owned by the Libyan State Oil Company and for the control of the port and the stretch of water as a coast guard.
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Business that according to substantial allegations added to human trafficking and smuggling. But the Libyan justice decided otherwise: Bija is now free.
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