This article is more than 5 months old

This article is more than 5 months old

Libya’s UN-recognised government in Tripoli has refused to authorise the landing of migrants stopped at sea and sent back to Libyan territory by its coastguard vessels.

The Libyan coastguard stopped about 280 migrants on Thursday, but when it attempted to return them to Libya, the country’s authorities refused to let them disembark, according to the UN migration agency IOM, due to fighting around the capital.

IOM initially said that ‘‘due to the intensity in shelling, relevant officials in Tripoli had declared its own seaports closed and ‘unsafe’”.

The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), said on Tuesday, however, that Libyan ports had not closed as the IOM had claimed. “The IOM mistake is due to the fact that there was shelling near the commercial port and the Libyan coastguard refused to disembark the people,” Vincent Cochetel, the UNHCR’s special envoy for the central Mediterranean, told the Guardian.

“Some escaped ... Around 160 Sudanese were released. Libya’s Directorate for Combating Illegal Migration does not seem able or prepared to take more detainees.”

Since a deal was signed with the Italian government in 2017, the Libyan coastguard has stopped migrant boats heading to Europe at sea and sent their passengers back to Libya, where aid agencies say they face torture and abuse.

Despite the fear of Covid-19, hundreds of migrants continue to risk their lives at sea in order to reach Europe.

EU member states have been accused of abandoning people at sea after failing to respond to information provided by NGOs that four boats, carrying 258 migrants between them, were in distress.

In an unprecedented move on Tuesday, the Italian government also declared its seaports “unsafe” because of the coronavirus pandemic and said it would not authorise the landing of migrant rescue boats until the end of the emergency.

A few days earlier, Malta’s government took a similar measure and also declared its seaports closed to migrants, citing the threat of the coronavirus. According to charities, Maltese authorities have also increasingly been delaying responses to migrant boats in distress.

Alarm Phone, a hotline service for migrants in distress at sea, has shared two audio recordings with the Guardian of a series of calls from a group of asylum seekers claiming an official from a Maltese navy boat on Thursday sabotaged their vessel, carrying about 70 people, by cutting the engine cable.

“We have an emergency here,” a man can be heard saying in one of the audio recordings. “The Maltese military came and cut the motor cable. There is water in the boat. The Maltese military said: ‘We will leave you to die in the water. Nobody will come to Malta.’”

“Please help us. We will die,” says another man. “The Malta military ship number is P52.”

The migrants, who were allegedly boarded by the Maltese navy roughly 20 miles south-west of Malta, were eventually rescued by the Maltese authorities.

The Guardian has asked the Maltese navy for comment but the officials have did not respond.

Since the beginning of the coronavirus emergency, the central Mediterranean route has become increasingly impenetrable for people fleeing war-afflicted Libya.

The risk, according to charitable organisations, is that the restrictive measures in Italy and Malta will set the migrant situation back years, to when boats from Libya would set off on their own, risking people’s lives in the attempt to reach Italian shores.

“European governments’ actions to close their ports to people rescued at sea put lives at risk and cannot be justified on public health grounds,” said Judith Sunderland, associate Europe and central Asia director at Human Rights Watch.

“Recent and unfolding events in the Mediterranean Sea raise serious concerns that European Union countries will use the Covid-19 pandemic as an excuse to evade their responsibilities under international law to respond to boats in distress at sea.”

On Friday, Italian authorities said a 15-year-old who had landed on the Italian island of Lampedusa on Tuesday had tested positive for Covid-19 and been placed under quarantine.

The rescue boat Alan Kurdi, operated by the German NGO Sea Eye and named after the three-year-old Syrian boy who drowned in 2015, is currently the only NGO rescue boat operating in the central Mediterranean.

The coronavirus outbreak has forced many charities to concentrate their aid efforts elsewhere, while other rescue groups, such as Sea Watch and SOS Méditerranée, have not returned to international waters after being quarantined for 14 days after their last missions at the end of February.

In a sign of how dangerous Libya is for those trying to reach Europe, dozens of people held at Tripoli’s main port since Thursday fled the facility as it was being shelled early on Friday morning.