JEDDAH: Qatar claimed it is ready to sit at the negotiating table to try to end a dispute with its Gulf Arab neighbors.
“As you know we have had a siege of more than 100 days against Qatar,” Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani was quoted as saying by Reuters on Friday at a joint news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Berlin. “We spoke about Qatar’s readiness to sit at the table to solve this issue.”
Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain cut diplomatic and trade links with Qatar on June 5, accusing the major gas-exporting Gulf state of financing terrorism and cozying up to their arch-rival Iran. Doha denies the charges.
Previous attempts for negotiations have been thwarted by Doha's insistence to put conditions prior to the dialogue.
The Anti-Terror Quartet (ATQ), comprising Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain, has repeatedly welcomed the idea of sitting down for talks without any preconditions. Qatar never indicated any clear signs of doing so.
Merkel said she was concerned that there was still no solution to the crisis, adding she supported efforts by Kuwait and the United States to mediate an end to the dispute.
Qatar claims it is ready for talks to end crisis
Qatar claims it is ready for talks to end crisis
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Libya’s security authorities free more than 200 migrants from ‘secret prison’, two security sources say
- Security authorities had found an underground prison, nearly three meters deep, which the sources said was run by a Libyan human trafficker
BENGHAZI: Libya’s security authorities have freed more than 200 migrants from what they described as a secret prison in the town of Kufra in the southeast of the country after they were held captive in inhuman conditions, two security sources from the city told Reuters on Sunday.
The security sources, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the security authorities had found an underground prison, nearly three meters deep, which the sources said was run by a Libyan human trafficker.
One of the sources said this person had not yet been detained.
“Some of the freed migrants were held captive up to two years in the underground cells,” this source said.
The other source said what the operation had found was “one of the most serious crimes against humanity that has been uncovered in the region.”
“The operation resulted in a raid on a secret prison within the city, where several inhumane underground detention cells were uncovered,” one of the sources added.
The freed migrants are from sub-Saharan Africa, mainly from Somalia and Eritrea, including women and children, the sources said. Kufra lies in eastern Libya, about 1,700 kilometers (1,000 miles) from the capital Tripoli.
Libya has become a transit route for migrants fleeing conflict and poverty to Europe via dangerous routes across the desert and over the Mediterranean since the toppling of Muammar Qaddafi in a NATO-backed uprising in 2011.
The oil-based Libyan economy is also a draw for impoverished migrants seeking work, but security throughout the sprawling country is poor, leaving migrants vulnerable to abuses.
At least 21 bodies of migrants were found in a mass grave in eastern Libya last week, with up to 10 survivors in the group bearing signs of having been tortured before they were freed from captivity, two security sources told Reuters.
Libya’s attorney general said in a statement on Friday the authorities in the east of the country had referred a defendant to the court for trial in connection with the mass grave on charges of “committing serious violations against migrants.”
In February last year, 39 bodies of migrants were recovered from about 55 mass graves in Kufra. The town houses tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees who fled the conflict that erupted in Sudan in 2023.
