Geneva – A quarter million people have fled Libya since the uprising against Moammar Gadhafi’s regime began last month, officials said Friday, as they warned they are having trouble getting foreign workers home.
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About 6,000 people a day are still crossing into Tunisia and Egypt, many of them Bangladeshi workers who need longer flights, said Mohammed Abdiker, the International Organization for Migration’s operation director.
“If the majority continue to be Bangladeshis needing long haul charter flights to get home, the cost to repatriate them will far exceed our current resources,” he said.
There were 8,000 refugees and asylum seekers already in Libya when the crisis began — many of them people fleeing from Iraq, Somalia and Eritrea. Among those only a few hundred had managed to cross the borders out of Libya.
So far, however, refugee workers have not seen Libyans crossing the border to flee their homeland, U.N. refugee agency spokesman Adrian Edwards said.
The migration organization and the U.N. say they need about 70 long-haul flights to Bangladesh and other Asian and sub-Saharan African destinations.