Some of the bodies of migrants found in two mass graves in Libya bore gunshot wounds, the International Organization for Migration said, adding that one of the sites is thought to contain up to 70 bodies.
Libya’s attorney general said Sunday that at least 28 bodies had been recovered from a mass grave in the desert north of Kufra city and blamed a gang for subjecting illegal migrants to torture and inhumane treatment.
It said the authorities were conducting forensic tests to understand the cause of their deaths and had detained three suspects.
That followed 19 other bodies being found in a mass grave in the Jikharra area, also in southeastern Libya, a security directorate said, blaming a known smuggling network.
Franz Prutsch, senior program coordinator for immigration and border governance at the International Organization for Migration, told Reuters that those 19 bodies showed “signs of injuries, including inflicted wounds and gunshots.”
Meanwhile, the grave in Kufra contained 30-70 bodies, Prutsch said, speaking from the capital, Tripoli.
The IOM could not give details of how long the bodies had been in the graves, but said they might have been there for some time.
Last March, the bodies of 65 migrants were found in a mass grave in the southwest of the country.
Libya has turned into a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe across the Mediterranean. Some 22% of the 965 recorded deaths and disappearances of migrants in Libya happened on land routes, according to IOM’s Missing Migrants Project.
At the end of January, Libyan authorities said they had freed 263 migrants of different sub-Saharan nationalities, saying they were “being held by a smuggling gang in extremely poor human and health conditions.”
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