This is the harrowing, step-by-step story of a migrant’s journey to Europe. Host by seedy Saisykhan. Nearly every part of the illegal journey a migrant makes from West Africa to Europe across the Sahara desert and the Mediterranean is filled with peril. But even a routine roll call, innocuous as it may seem, can turn into a recurring nightmare.
Andrew (real name withheld), a Nigerian migrant with hopes of reaching Italy, found that out the hard way at Sabratha, a coastal town in northern Libya in February 2016.
As desperate migrants are transported across borders through a vast illegal network, their smugglers carry out roll calls at regular intervals during the long convoluted itinerary to confirm every migrants’ journey has been fully paid up. While most migrants pay “agents”-the shady middlemen who make all the initial travel arrangements-at the start of their journey to arrange the trip all the way to Europe, these agents do not always pay the smugglers the full amount. When migrants duped by agents become stranded along the way, things turn ugly. In Andrew’s case, the agent had paid his way to Libya but not all the way to Europe, as previously agreed.
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