---
title: "Listen: A team of journalists at gunpoint (Libya, Part 3)"
description: "We follow the harrowing story of Aliou Candé — a 28-year-old farmer and father from Guinea-Bissau — whose dream of a better life ended in one of Libya’s brutal migrant prisons."
type: "NewsArticle"
publisher: "Daily Maverick"
site: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za"
section: "THE OUTLAW OCEAN PROJECT"
author: "The Outlaw Ocean Project"
author_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/author/the-outlaw-ocean-project/"
canonical_url: "https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2025-06-20-listen-a-team-of-journalists-at-gunpoint-libya-part-3/"
published: "2025-06-20T12:24:39"
updated: "2025-06-20T12:24:42"
lang: "en-ZA"
word_count: 234
---

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

> We follow the harrowing story of Aliou Candé — a 28-year-old farmer and father from Guinea-Bissau — whose dream of a better life ended in one of Libya’s brutal migrant prisons.

By The Outlaw Ocean Project · Published 20 June 2025, 14:24 SAST · Updated 20 June 2025, 14:24 SAST

## Key points
- In a harrowing exposé, the Libyan Coast Guard becomes the EU's enforcer of misery, capturing desperate migrants and imprisoning them in hellish conditions, while a journalist's brush with death reveals the grim reality of a war on migration.
- The Libyan Coast Guard is complicit in migrant detentions, serving EU interests by capturing and imprisoning those attempting to cross the Mediterranean.
- Investigative journalist Ian Urbina faces brutal treatment in a secret prison, highlighting the dire conditions migrants endure.
- Urbina and his team document their harrowing experience while reflecting on the stark contrast of their privilege compared to the migrants.
- The series reveals a growing "war on migration", with escalating violence as desperate individuals continue to seek refuge in Europe.

## Content

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.

![Refugees aboard a small MSF rescue vessel in the Mediterranean Sea. (Photo: Ed Ou//The Outlaw Ocean Project)](https://cdn.dailymaverick.co.za/i/tNxurj0AyjX_zaDWGAE8Y9Y8zok=/200x100/smart/filters:strip_exif\(\)/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/2021_06_12_MSF_MEDITERRANEAN_SUNRISE_AND_AFTERNOON_RESCUES_BANGLADESH_AND_ETHIOPIANS_PHOTO_00108-1.jpg)

*Refugees aboard a small MSF rescue vessel in the Mediterranean Sea. (Photo: Ed Ou / The Outlaw Ocean Project)*

#### **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**

[Spotify audio](https://open.spotify.com/embed/episode/7GiT0i1fxqmgVPfl3ZO43o?utm_source=generator)