Listen: A team of journalists at gunpoint (Libya, Part 3)

The Libyan Coast Guard is doing the European Union’s dirty work, capturing migrants as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean into Europe and throwing them in secret prisons. There, they are extorted, abused and sometimes killed. An investigation into the death of Aliou Candé, a young farmer and father from Gineau-Bisseau, puts the Outlaw Ocean team in the crosshairs of Libya’s violent and repressive regime. In this stunning three-part series, we take you inside the walls of one of the most dangerous prisons, in a lawless regime where the world’s forgotten migrants languish.

Episode highlights

• Host Ian Urbina is detained, beaten and brought to a secret prison jail. He believes he is going to die. And still, he knows this is only “a sliver of what the migrants we are covering go through”.
• Ian learns his team is being held in the same facility. They make proof-of-life videos as their respective governments intervene to get them out. Ian reflects on Western privilege and the lottery of birth. He, unlike Candé, gets to go home.
• He also gets to report what he saw: a war on migration. A war with an army, a navy, and an air force. A war likely to spread as more poor, desperate migrants risk it all to reach safer shores. DM