Lucy Sexton and Joe Sexton | Atavist Magazine | July 2023 | 1,233 words (5 minutes)
This is an excerpt from the issue. 141, “held together”
Becoming a single father ended my career as a sportswriter. With two young girls to take care of, I wasn’t able to take a West Coast swing during baseball season.So I moved to Times” I got a job at a subway desk and became a proper city reporter, doing a mix of hard news and feature stories. From the TWA Flight 800 explosion off the coast of Long Island to the story of a Brooklyn Hasidic mother who was one of the most high-profile voices during a local school lice outbreak, her daughters I’ve been working on some of my challenges over the years.time times When I was asked to help organize an in-house seminar on street reporting, I made sure to tell young reporters that success is often determined before they go out into the field. If you are fatalistic about getting what you need, you are bound to fail. Even though we are forced to believe that an impossible press coup is possible, it often never happens. It may be a cliché, but it’s also true, at least in my experience.
When two members of our team returned to the Royal Gardens after a trip to Al Mabani, I felt rustic. The driver refused to even slow down as he passed the prison, fearing he would be stopped at gunpoint.
I followed my own advice regarding Libya and tried to imagine what the coverage on the ground would be like before I arrived. I foresaw secret conversations with friends and relatives of imprisoned immigrants on the dusty streets outside detention facilities. Perhaps there may be a way to talk to the prisoner through the barred window. Notes may be exchanged.
Needless to say, the cityscape was less than ideal for the kind of street reporting I knew. Simply venturing out on foot or by car risked encountering armed groups stationed at a complex pattern of checkpoints across Tripoli. And then there was the issue of the security team. They were assigned to us with Red Crescent assistance, but a little Googling revealed that the company they worked for was run by a former Libyan military official accused of war crimes. I found out that it was like that. Were they actually monitoring our actions as government watchdogs? The militia members themselves? Was there a connection?
Libya, I realized a little late, was a mysterious place.
In addition to myself and Ian Urbina, our team included Dutch documentary filmmaker Mair Dors de Jong and Pierre Kattar, who had been working as a video journalist for many years. The Washington Post. Contrary to expectations, we were able to get some reporting breaks right away. Aid groups have been documenting abuses for years and working to bring comfort to the tens of thousands of migrants trapped inside Libya. One of those organizations was able to provide us with the names of young immigrants shot dead in al-Mabani and witnesses to the killing. The man who died was Alio Cande, a farmer and father of three from Guinea-Bissau who was captured by the Libyan coast guard as he tried to start a new life in Italy. The witness was a man named Mohammad David from Ivory Coast. He managed to escape from al-Mabani in the chaos following Khande’s murder. We had his cell phone number.
On our first night in Tripoli, the three of us arrived in Gargaresh, a migrant ghetto. The militia favored conducting brutal sweeps of Gargaresh’s mix of hideouts and encampments. Along the district’s main street, lined with dim neon lights, stealthy figures, internet cafes and cheap eateries, we meet Mohammad David. Pierre, who speaks French and whose father once served as an interpreter at the U.S. embassy in Paris, was able to understand enough of his words to draw out the broad story of Cande’s murder.
There was a fight inside one of al-Mabani’s crowded and stinking cells. Guards opened fire with automatic weapons indiscriminately. Khande was hit in the neck and dragged along the wall, blood streaking the wall before he collapsed and died. Other detainees did not allow his body to be removed from the cell until he was granted freedom. Then Mohammad David arrived at Gargalesh.
The incident made it clear that al-Mabani, like many other prisons in Libya, was run by one of the violent militias that had divided Tripoli into guarded and sometimes warring fiefdoms. It was a reminder. These forces extort ransoms from the families of imprisoned migrants, steal aid money meant to feed and clothe prisoners, and sell men and women into forced slavery. Kande’s killing gave some of his fellow prisoners some influence over their captors, albeit for a rare and brief period.
Other unexpected press victories piled up in the days following my conversation with David. We found a man who acts as something of an unofficial liaison for Guinea-Bissau migrants making a living in Tripoli. He took us to Kande’s great-uncle and showed us the police documents regarding Kande’s death. The cause of his death was listed as a “fight.” Officials said Khande was buried in a vast expanse of earth surrounded by a wall, which had become a graveyard for Tripoli’s unwanted people. We hired a local photographer to launch a camera drone over several acres of ancient burial mounds, most of which were unmarked. He managed to find one on which someone had written the name “Candy.”
Over the next few days, our team sneaked two other men who had spent time at Al Mabani into our hotel. One of them, a teenager, said he was shot in the leg the night Khande was killed. We pushed the boundaries of prudence to pursue these journalistic coups. Pierre brought a camera drone with him and flew over Al Mabani. The scene he captured resembled a concentration camp. After being fed in the courtyard, the men were herded under threat of violence and returned single file to their cells while being punched on the head so they looked up at the sky.
It quickly became apparent that our security personnel were reporting at least some of what we were doing to our superiors, whoever they were. One day, an American expatriate who worked for the security forces came to visit us. She warned us that what we were doing was dangerous and she requested that we be informed of any suggestions for further reporting activities outside the hotel premises.
One morning, we told the Red Crescent staff that we would like to visit the morgue where Mr. Khande’s body had been taken. Mair and I got into the van and drove through the streets of Tripoli. The morgue was part of a complex of massive buildings protected by imposing walls and fences. Inside, there was a man sitting at a desk. When we asked to see Kande’s records, he looked through several file cabinets.
A freshly wrapped body lay on a stretcher in the center of the main room. In a side room, workers poured water from a hose onto another body. Behind a series of curtains was a wall of cold room that could probably hold 20 corpses. It was incredibly hot and completely quiet.
Mair was recording what we were seeing from a small camera mounted discreetly on her stomach until someone noticed and reported it to the man at the desk. It’s finally time to leave.