ROME — A young man from Ghana has been jailed after migrants told authorities he tortured them while they were in Libya awaiting smugglers to send them by boat to Italy, police said Saturday. Police in Agrigento said several migrants identified the 20-year-old as the man who had raped several women and beat, burned or administered electric shocks to migrants who were kept in a "safe house" in Libya awaiting passage. A police statement said the man arrived on the Sicilian island of Lampedusa on March 5. Authorities said migrants recognized him as having committed torture and they had to intervene to stop several from trying to lynch him. With much of Libya essentially lawless after the 2011 demise of longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi, authorities in Italy have heavily relied on migrants' accounts to learn about human traffickers and their helpers.

Source: Libya Today March 18, 2017 17:26 UTC