The images circulated quickly on social media on the afternoon of the 1st.Ahem September. We see a man lying slumped over, his body riddled with bullets, in a white car. He has just been shot dead as he was leaving the naval academy in Tripoli (Libya), in what appears to be a settling of scores between militias. The man was quickly identified as Abd Al-Rahman Al-Milad, nicknamed “Bija”, former commander of the coast guard in Zaouïa, a town located about fifty kilometres west of Tripoli.
The disappearance of the Bija closes one of the less glorious chapters of the migration crisis in the Mediterranean and of the unpleasant relations between Libya and Italy in recent years. On 2 February 2017, Prime Minister Faïez Sarraj, head of the “government of national accord”, signed a memorandum in Rome together with the head of the Italian government, Paolo Gentiloni. The aim is to help Libya push back migrants, in particular by providing it with maritime resources. The Libyan coast guard will benefit from Italian experience. Without this agreement, Bija might not have suffered such a fate.
A notorious immigrant trafficker, who has become rich mainly through oil smuggling, “Bija” is associated with the sad reality of Libyan detention camps, from which refugees who managed to reach the Italian coast tell a story of hell. Very few images of him have been circulated, and his official biography shows him to have been born in Tripoli in 1986.
“A death foretold”
“It is the chronicle of a death foretold, his criminal ties exposed him, he will remain a man who kept many secrets”, tell him World Nello Scavo, who revealed in the columns of the newspaper Future Libya’s mediocre relations with Italy. In 2019, this Sicilian journalist published an investigation into the secret arrival in Italy two years earlier of a Libyan mission to a reception centre in Mineo, located in the province of Catania.
Among the delegation is “Bija,” and some refugees recognize him with fear, knowing his brutality. In September 2016, he was filmed, dressed in uniform, beating migrants with a rope, while they were crammed into a makeshift inflatable boat on the high seas.
Taking a close interest in the “Libyan mafia” will cost Nello Scavo dearly: he has received death threats and has since been living under police protection. “Bija” himself tried to intimidate the journalist in a conversation intercepted by the Italian intelligence services. He called himself the last of the “revolutionaries,” displaying a self-confidence that would be worthy of study by a psychologist., Scavo writes in a book dedicated to these investigations, The demonstration at the Coast Guard (“Without a doubt, the coast guard”, 2024, Chiarelettere, untranslated).
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