S2 E3: A team of journalists at gunpoint (Libya Pt. 3)

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In May of 2021, I landed in Tripoli, Libya with a team made up of Pierre Qatar, a translator and photographer, Joe Sexton, an editor, and Maya Dolls, a videographer.

We were there in part to report the story of Aliu Conde, a young man from Guinea-Bissau, who had pinned his hopes and those of his family on finding work in Europe.

Aliu had made his way from Guinea-Bissau to Libya, where he paid human smugglers for a spot on an overcrowded dinghy that they promised would get him across the Mediterranean.

But after almost 20 hours at sea, Aliu was picked up in international waters along with the other migrants in the boat by the Libyan Coast Guard.

The migrants were hauled back to Libya and jailed in Al-Mabani prison in Tripoli.

While Aliu was in Al-Mabani, he was killed in a prison riot.

We were committed to telling his story because it exemplified just how horrid the abuse of migrants in Libya is.

But we also wanted to tell a larger story about the EU's role in making this abuse possible.

We wanted to explore who the real beneficiaries were and are of this inhumane system of migration control.

Reporting the story had already taken a toll on me and my team.

A lot of what we'd been promised by Libyan officials never materialized, and working with them had become far more adversarial than we had expected.

We'd been assigned a security detail, and at times, it wasn't really clear if they were there to protect us or to keep tabs on us.

So we'd been in Tripoli for about a week, and we were all looking forward to moving on.

It was Sunday night, spirits were high.

Pierre, Joe, and Maya were getting sick of the hotel food and wanted to go out to a restaurant.

So they convinced the security team to take them.

I had some work to do, so I decided to stay back at the hotel.

Here's Pierre.

We were thinking, let's celebrate.

I found this fish restaurant a day or two before.

The security guard, we told them about the place and they said, oh yeah, that's great.

Great.

Good choice.

Let's go.

Let's go.

And so we get in the car and we pull out of the hotel and we get on the main highway and the security guards start kind of like looking at their rear of the mirror and they're getting a little nervous and 30 seconds later they're like dinner is off we gotta go we gotta go we gotta go hotel we made this u-turn from what i could see two white pickup trucks slammed into the cars right to our left and right four to six masked men with what looked like AK-47s got out of those cars.

Two of the masked men jump in the car and they point towards us and they go, down, down!

What do you do in this situation?

I mean, we're completely powerless.

There's no,

you cannot do anything.

You are powerless.

I thought we were going to be executed very soon.

I just kept thinking about how

I did not want to be tortured.

How...

I hope that they kill us soon and

how guilty I felt that I was going to put my family through

this.

He disappeared one day.

We don't know where he went.

Never know what happened to Pierre.

I'm Ian Urbina, and this is the Outlaw Ocean.

I was on the phone with my wife when I heard a knock at the door of my room.

I walked over and opened it.

Standing there were a dozen men in uniform.

They started screaming at me in a mix of Arabic and English and pushed me back as they forced their way into the room.

And I remember the feeling of cold metal on forehead, and that was the gun that was at my head.

And they were yelling, get on the floor.

I still had my wife on the phone in my hand, and I was trying to move very slow because I was afraid they were going to shoot me.

I laid down, and immediately they put a hood over my head.

The first thing they said was, where is your tracking device?

I remember being blown away.

The one thing that we had been quiet about and the one thing that was supposed to provide us with some sense of security was this little Garmin mini device that it required everyone to wear at all times if they left the hotel on their belt.

And it was a satellite device that would supposedly keep us safe and transmit our location to my team back in the US, who was watching us 24-7 to see where we were.

And we were checking in with them every six hours, et cetera.

And here, these guys immediately knew that was the first thing they needed to get.

And so I said, It's over there, it's orange, it's on the table.

My face was down, hooded.

And again, wife still on the phone.

And then the next thing they said is, hang up the phone.

So they knew I was on the phone.

So I thought, I remember thinking, whoa, okay, these guys are on top of their game.

And then the beating began.

I don't know how long that lasted, but I tried to make my body as small as I could, and I was trying to hide the stuff that you don't want.

Kicked my head, my inner organs, and such, my groin.

I remember doing this weird real-time assessment of damage level.

Oh, that one's going to probably break something.

Because I thought, are they going to kill me right now, or are they just going to rough me up?

So I was face down on the floor of my hotel room.

I couldn't see anything because they'd covered my head with a hood.

All I knew was that I was surrounded by a dozen men in militia uniforms with guns pointed at me.

I remember hearing a voice.

It was speaking in Arabic and he had authority, you could tell, because everyone stepped back.

And he walked over and and he then stood on my head and he put his full weight on.

And I thought, this is too much pressure.

He's going to kill me right now.

And then he took his foot off.

And then some guys came and scooped me up under my armpits and they dragged me out of the room.

They took me outside.

I remember under the hood seeing lots of lights.

And then they put me in what I could tell was like an unmarked car.

It was like a sedan feeling thing.

They put me in the back.

And one big guy was on one side and one big guy was on the other side.

And every now and again, someone would punch my head just kind of like they hated me and they wanted to get a quick shot in and this was their chance.

Five minutes, ten minutes of waiting in the car and off we went.

I tried to kind of keep track of how many turns, how long are we going and can I hear any sounds that are distinct so maybe I can keep track of where we are in relation to the hotel.

And they took me to a, what we found out later was a secret prison.

When I first got to the prison, still hooded, I was brought into what my ears told me was clearly an office.

I was sat down in a chair and told to stay there.

Someone began asking me questions, and the questions he was asking were bureaucratic.

And that was reassuring to me because I thought, if they care about my birth date, there's some sort of administration around this.

And that's a good thing.

I was then picked up out of this room and taken to my cell, which was a solitary cell and sort of tossed in there.

And then they told me I could take the hood off.

And I saw the backside of a guy as he closed the door behind him.

The cell is tiny.

It was about eight by eight.

And in there, there was a toilet.

There was like all sorts of wads of hair, you know, almost like tumbleweed in the corners and on the mattress.

And I remember just a lot of ants on the floor.

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the rest of my team, Maya, Joe, and Pierre, had just been forced into an SUV at gunpoint.

Here's Pierre again.

We're like

shocked.

Holy shit.

Okay, down.

They use

the

blue surgical face masks that we had in the van in the armrest.

They use that to blindfold us.

They started driving

and,

you know, once in a while I would try to glance up and they would go, down!

Then we got, we arrived somewhere and they put hoods on our heads.

and

kind of let us out of the car.

So you're blind, you can't see anything, you're being let out.

And, you know, still with the hood.

And I just heard lots of footsteps walking around.

And I heard the guns, you know, that clinging, clanging of like the heavy metal.

And I was like, where the fuck are we?

Oh my God, what's happening?

They kind of sat us down on this leather couch.

They were walking by us and they would stop and step on our feet, kind of like an intimidation tactic or something, right?

Just to say, here, we're here, you're gonna be fucked.

It was my turn to be interrogated.

They saw that I was born in Lebanon from my passport.

They said, you know, what are you doing here?

And we answered the questions.

They said, no, that's not true.

One guard was standing right in front of me and he said, you speak Arabic?

And I said, a little bit, yeah.

Shway.

And he's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

You're one of us.

You look like one of us.

You look like you're from the north.

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't fuck with me.

And I'm like, okay.

I just kind of shut up.

And all of a sudden, a hand, you know, slaps my head really hard.

And I'm like, oh, okay.

We're going to be tortured.

And then they kind of chuckled because I had long hair at the time and it kind of flew around.

And they said something like, I could have understood this.

Look how his hair moves around.

Isn't it?

It's like a girl or it's funny or something like this.

And then another, boom.

Another guy I felt came and gave me a whack.

They took me, put me in a cell, and then someone opened the door

and threw some shit at me.

They took my hood off, and I was just like looking on the ground.

And I noticed there was an orange juice, and I was like, okay,

so I'm not dying tonight, but I don't know how long I'm going to be here.

My family doesn't know where I am.

We've been disappeared.

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There was no pulse.

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I could feel a body next to me.

I realized that the person next to me is Joe.

And he looks at me.

He's like, did they hurt you, man?

I'm like, no, no, no, I'm okay.

I'm okay.

And I'm like, did they hurt you?

He's like, no, no, no, no, I'm all right.

I'm like, all right, good, good, good.

And everybody's kind of still in shock, like, oh my God, what the fuck?

They were dust bunnies of garlic and bird feathers in a room.

That's what the migrants said about Alma Bani.

And we had one mattress between Joe and I, so we'd share it.

We'd sleep kind of diagonally on it.

And I just thought of the migrants telling us about the feathers in their room, about the fact that they had to share a mattress.

I was spending a lot of time like trying to clean the toilet, but it was just a disgusting toilet with flies and caked on shit everywhere.

I realized the toilet was working, so I would like flush it.

and let the water go and then use that water that was in the tank to kind of clean the bowl.

And that was making noise.

Then I heard a

on the wall like a knocking and I was like

one of those like what the fuck this is a movie because I did not know where Ian was it was just Joe and I all of a sudden I hear Pierre

My biggest curiosity that lasted the first two and a half days was where are the others being kept.

And so I would tap on the walls for the first 48 hours hoping that someone might tap back.

This is all Hollywood bullshit.

I was just making it up from things I had seen and trying to figure out what ideas might have a logic to them.

And I thought, well, screaming isn't a good play, but tapping on the walls might get a tap back.

You know, so I just kept tapping and tapping for what felt like hours.

And then, you know, basically I realized I had nothing to lose.

So I called out under the door and said, Pierre?

And I heard back, Ian.

And

it kind of set me back.

You know, I was just shocked that there he was.

And I'm not sure if the guards had left or what, but no one came barging in and told us to shut up.

So I forged ahead and sort of whispered under the door to Pierre, you know, across wherever he was.

I whispered out loud, you know, did he know where Joe and Maya were?

And he said that Joe was actually in the same cell with him, but he wasn't sure where Maya was.

Then we heard a female voice, and it was like, guys?

And it was Maya.

Again, no clue where the voices were coming from, but obviously someplace close.

And now it was clear that apparently we were all being held in the same hallway, you know, in different, maybe adjoining cells.

You know, it was in some ways profoundly reassuring to know that A, the rest of the team were still alive and seemingly okay, and B, that we were at least close to each other.

Every what seemed like three hours, someone would come to the cell, say, get up, and I would be told to follow them to this office.

These interrogations would last two hours and were

aimed at building a case that would prove their theory.

And their theory was that I was CIA and that my mission there was murky, to destabilize the Libyan government writ large, to embarrass Libyans in general due to this migrant thing, but maybe other things too.

Terrorism was mentioned, sabotage.

At one point, they confronted me with this packet of papers that I had in my backpack, which they had confiscated.

And they said, you know, only a spy would carry a packet of papers with phone numbers of the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry in it.

And the title of this packet of papers you have is secret document.

And I said, that's completely wrong.

The title of that packet is security document.

And the names in that packet are all the people that we would call anyone on our team if we got in trouble.

But they would not be moved off of that.

It became very clear that being a journalist and doing journalism was not actually a defense.

It was just an additional crime.

You know, being a spy was the first crime in their book, and being a journalist was a secondary crime.

When the knock came on the door, I was on the phone with my my wife.

And when the men barged in, screaming and telling me to get on the floor, she was still on the phone listening to all the commotion.

And while she couldn't make out specifically what was going on, it was pretty clear to her that something bad was happening.

She began calling everyone on the security document we'd made that needed to be alerted that something bad had happened to us, starting with the U.S.

State Department.

I get pulled out of the cell.

It's the middle of the night.

They pull me out into the courtyard.

There are three guys.

One of them has a gun.

One of them is this translator guy.

And they have a cell phone.

And they tell me, if I make any false moves or say anything alarmist or anything critical about how I've been treated or discuss the beatings, they will end me right there.

And I took them seriously.

On the cell phone is the U.S.

State Department, and I said, you know, trying to be very careful.

Thanks for getting in touch.

I think you need to probably do this on a daily basis.

We're being held here.

And I would say this is a fairly serious, high priority for the White House.

It's that level of stakes because this could end poorly.

So I was trying to speak as clearly as I could to get her to escalate this.

And the final thing I said was:

you would be smart to have visual confirmation.

My hope was that the State Department would send someone to come check on us, but the problem was that we were being held in a secret location, a black site, essentially.

And the people holding us had absolutely no intention of divulging its location to the U.S.

government.

So the Libyans Libyans refused that request.

And I think that small detail is honestly a pretty good indication of just how far afield we were from, you know, normal diplomacy or whatever you would call what was happening to us in Libya.

You know, there's no functioning centralized government, just warring militias.

And so it's hard for someone like the State Department to even open a channel of communication, let alone make demands.

But the State Department was able to reach a compromise, essentially, with the Libyans.

Instead of a U.S.

official coming to check on us, the Libyans would provide a proof-of-life video.

Two days after that first call with the State Department, the guards came to my cell and told me that I needed to clean myself up and make sure all the blood was washed off me.

So I did what I could to make myself presentable, but even then I hadn't eaten in what felt like several days and I'd barely been able to sleep.

I had a couple of broken ribs and I was still pissing blood and my spleen was bruised.

I found out later.

Bottom line was I was in pretty bad shape.

They marched me into an office and that's where I was finally able to see Pierre, Joe, and Maya for the first time since we'd been taken.

That was really overwhelming emotionally for all of us.

We were hungry, sleep-deprived.

We'd all been physically and mentally pretty beaten down.

First and foremost, we were terrified for our lives.

We were specifically afraid of getting disappeared and sent to the south of Libya where we knew we'd be killed.

Maya broke down at one point and started...

crying pretty intensely.

And one of the guards came over to me and I'll never forget what he said.

He sort sort of whispered and said, get her under control, or else I'll give her something to cry about.

May was really tough, and she pretty quickly rebounded, got herself together.

The four of us then huddled and started trying to figure out what we should say on the video.

The Libyans had been unequivocally clear that we needed to smile and put on a good face and show that everything was okay and that we were being treated kindly and lawfully.

But I knew that this was our one lifeline to the U.S.

government and that we needed to somehow let them know that we were absolutely not okay.

I told my team that I'd go first and that they should follow my lead.

Honestly, I didn't know what that meant at the time.

But and then the Libyans just started filming.

First of all, thank you for your inquiries.

It's making a big difference.

Today is Wednesday, May 26th.

And we've been told that we can go soon.

We have this.

The video is about a minute long, and you can see the four of us seated in a semicircle around a coffee table that's covered in this surreal and elaborate spread of drinks and snacks.

There's even a bouquet of flowers in the center.

Maya and Pierre were holding milkshakes that the guards had handed them.

It's just this ridiculous level of overkill to convey that they were treating us luxuriously.

We've been asked to reassure you that we're being treated well,

getting food and water.

And as soon as we provide provide that reassurance to you guys, then we should be on our way.

I will just second the graphic.

We went around the circle, me, then Joe, Maya, then Pierre, and we basically all said the same thing.

And we've been treated very well, and I thank all of you for your inquiries.

You know, our hope was that sort of stressing how meaningful the State Department's inquiries had been, and that we hoped to be released that day or tomorrow, that the State Department would realize the dire situation, and that would sort of sound an alarm that we were not doing as well as it might look on camera.

You know, thankfully, it worked.

The State Department got the video, and shortly thereafter,

we learned that we were going to be relocated to a different site where a representative from the State Department would come to see us.

And hopefully, that would be one step closer to us being released.

They brought us together to this one office where all of our stuff was laid out on the floor, everything, all the contents of our backpacks and all the satellite phones and everything we had where it was all there.

Everyone got their stuff and stood over on one side.

And the translator called me to a separate room and said,

you know, you're being treated differently.

And that's all he said.

And I didn't, that scared me to the core because I thought, oh, well, okay, so I'm not actually going to get released.

And then we stepped back in the room room, and he turned to the other three and said, You guys can go, Ian's staying.

And I remember, like, I felt like something in me had died all of a sudden.

It was the scariest shock I've ever felt in my core

because it felt so real and it felt fatal.

You know, it felt like a death sentence had just been surprised upon me.

And the look on, you know, on my colleagues' faces was bloodless.

And then he put his hand on my chest as if I'm not allowed to step forward to join them.

Literally, I think it was six seconds, but it felt like 60 minutes.

He then said, I'm kidding.

And I remember thinking,

what level of depravity does someone have to be at to make that a joke?

It was so ghastly.

We were moved from the prison to a nearby hotel.

It wasn't really a hotel.

It looked like a hotel, but it was this building that was run by the militia that had taken us captive.

And the lower floors were hotel rooms, like typical hotel rooms, but the upper floors were militia holding areas.

And they put each of us alone in our own room and put a guard on the door.

Obviously, we had no phone, and we were told to not even open the door without permission, and definitely not to talk to each other.

Pretty soon after that, a representative from the U.S.

Embassy came to see us in person and told us that they were working on getting us released.

Maya is a Dutch citizen, so she was dealing with a different set of officials, but it seemed like they were working together to get us out.

When we were moved and put in these rooms, we were finally allowed to make one phone call home.

So I actually got to call my wife, and that was game-changing for my soul.

We also at that point finally learned who exactly had taken us prisoner, a militia called Al-Nawasi, which is a division of the so-called Libya Intelligence Service.

So Maya was split from us at the hotel, put on a plane before us and en route.

So we didn't get to see or say goodbye to her.

And it was about 48 hours later that we were then taken to the airport, which was this strange process.

You know, all of our guards were super amped when we were being moved from our rooms to the car, and they had all this weaponry on them.

And the guys seemed very nervous.

We get to the airport, and their nervousness goes up even more.

They're walking us through the airport to these back offices and talking with these other guys and explaining, seemingly in Arabic, I don't speak Arabic, who we are and what's happening and showing papers.

And finally, they take us to this runway and this vehicle and the vehicle takes us to this plane.

And

on the bottom stair of the plane, the main guy who was calling a lot of the shots during interrogation told another guy to take a picture of us, sort of a photo to prove that they had actually put us alive on the plane and we got up on the plane and and um

and we were speechless it was the three of us americans so joe sexton pierre qatar and myself

what we found out later was the reason for all the firepower and nervousness was that the militia that had taken us was one of the two main militias in Tripoli, and the other main militia, the rival militia, had its headquarters at the airport.

So our militia was passing through the territory of this other militia, and there was very good reason to think that this could get dodgy and that the other militia could take us.

And our guys didn't want that to happen because they'd been given firm orders to get us on the plane.

In retrospect, I found all that out, but it just spoke to the sort of fractured reality that is Libya.

In the subsequent weeks, we kept in really close contact, the four of us, and talked through how we were all dealing with the trauma.

And some of us wanted to talk about it, and others didn't.

You know, I think the overriding sensibility that we all shared was that, number one, it was horrific, and yet, as journalists, we all thought it gave us a window on a sliver of what the migrants we were covering go through.

You know, arbitrary detention, violence.

And then again, the backdrop here of being Westerners, the luxury of having Dutch and American passports and having governments that intervene like ours did and get us out alive was also the other lingering and shared emotion, a deep sense of guilt and privilege that

by the lottery of birth we have something that these other folks recovering don't, and it's probably a life or death difference.

Aliu Khande's brothers have held onto a few of his final voice messages.

This is one that stuck with me.

Aliu is saying, whatever happens, everything that isn't God's will will pass.

You know, when I think about that comment, it really gives me pause.

Not because I want to challenge Aliu's faith, but rather because, in my view, it sort of misplaces the blame.

It wasn't God's will that put Aliu on an overcrowded dinghy in the dead of night.

It wasn't God's will will that led him to be captured.

It wasn't God's will that caused him to be trucked to a Libyan prison and murdered by its guards.

You know, all these things, to me at least, seem to be the predictable results of desperation, avarice, but most of all, the result of a lack of real strategies for mitigating what we have to admit is a growing crisis.

So, in my view, the fault here belongs to the EU, and it belongs to Libya, not God.

The EU has trained and equipped the Libyan Coast Guard to patrol the Mediterranean, to sabotage humanitarian rescue operations, and to capture migrants.

Many migrants die as a result of the Libyan Coast Guard's actions, and those that survive are then detained indefinitely in a network of profit-making prisons run by militias.

Prisons like Almabani, where Aliyu was held.

Almabani abruptly closed its doors in January 2022.

And in many ways, that might seem to be a journalistic victory, a victory for humanity in some ways.

But you know, the truth of the matter is that as quickly as Almabani closed, several Almabani clones opened up.

So fundamentally, the closing of Almabani didn't really change that much.

The EU says that their actions on the Mediterranean are a humanitarian effort.

They're trying to save migrants, trying to stop them from being trafficked, trying to prevent them from drowning, and that they want to return them to a place of safety.

What they're actually doing is the exact opposite.

They're arresting these vulnerable people at sea, and they're using a proxy force to do it, namely the Libyan coast guard they're sending them back to a place that everyone in the world knows is not safe and they're putting them in horrific prisons where they're routinely extorted tortured and often murdered

so this is anything but a humanitarian mission and the motivation here for the eu to do all this is utterly self-serving It's border patrol.

They're trying to prevent poor, desperate people from reaching European shores so they won't won't have to deal with the economic or political consequences of climate change and mass migration.

And they're using Frontex and the Libyan Coast Guard and the Libyan militias to do their dirty work.

So, in my view, what this really is, is a war.

It's a war on migration.

And this war has an army, a navy, and an air force.

The air force here, the armed entities that are patrolling the skies in this war to to stop people from moving across the Mediterranean border, that's Frontex.

The Navy, metaphorically speaking, is the Libyan Coast Guard, a proxy force working on behalf of the Europeans.

And the army, if you will, the guys on land with guns, these are the Libyan militias.

This is the war.

This is the war on migration, and it's the war that's playing out on behalf of the European Union in Libya.

And migrants like Aliu Kande are the casualties of this war.

What the EU is doing in Libya, namely the outsourcing of migrant control, the so-called southernization of its border by sending migrants to other countries for detention, is neither new nor isolated.

Australia does it by holding these people in Nauru and Papua New Guinea.

The U.S.

has been doing it for a while.

Under Obama, the government sent U.S.

dollars to Mexico to stop and hold migrants before they reached American soil.

Trump greatly escalated this cruelty, first by shipping migrants from the U.S.

to one of the world's most brutal mega-prisons in El Salvador.

But then in May 2025, Trump announced plans to ship migrants to a new location, Libya.

Next time on the Outlaw Ocean, we take a look at the murky world of maritime repossessions and meet Max Hardberger.

Max is the guy you call when you need to get a very large ship out of a very bad situation, especially when the law may not be entirely on your side.

This series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project.

It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina, written and produced by Michael Catano.

Our associate producer is Craig Ferguson.

Mix sound design and original music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh.

Additional sound recording by Tony Fowler.

For CBC podcasts, our coordinating producer is Fabiola Carletti.

Senior producer, Damon Fairless.

The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak.

Tanya Springer is the senior manager, and R.

F.

Narani is the director of CBC Podcasts.

Special thanks to Pierre Qatar, Joe Sexton, and Maya Doles.

This is Ian Urbina, the host of this show and the executive editor of The Outlaw Ocean Project.

I wanted to take a quick moment to let you know that if you're interested in digging deeper into this story and seeing the impact of our reporting, you'll find a lot more over at our website, theoutlawocean.com.

We've posted video from behind the walls of Al-Mabani prison, aerial footage of a migrant vessel being intercepted by the Libyan Coast Guard, and a collection of photos and voice recordings related to Ali Ukande's tragic story.

You'll also find the feature-length version of this story that ran in The New Yorker.

Again, we're really proud of the work we've done on this, and I'd love for you to take a moment to check it out over at the outlawocean.com.

Supporting this kind of not-for-profit journalism is more important now than ever before.

For CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.