AT LEAST 10 Irish citizens, including six employees of a Dublin-based engineering firm, are in the Libyan city of Benghazi, where a brutal crackdown against anti-regime protesters left scores dead at the weekend.
The six Irish nationals working for Mercury Engineering, a Dublin-headquartered company which has operated in Libya since the 1970s, are in a safe location on the outskirts of the city. The other Irish citizens are long-term residents of Benghazi due to family connections. They are also understood to be safe.
The Department of Foreign Affairs said it was working with EU partners with offices and consulates in Benghazi in a bid to ensure a safe passage for those who wish to leave.
Libyans constitute one of the biggest Arab communities in Ireland, and several Libyans living here have family links to the east of the country, where Benghazi is located.
Hussein Hamed, who is standing as an Independent candidate in the Dublin South constituency in Friday’s general election, is originally from the city.
“I haven’t been able to contact my family in Benghazi since Saturday. It is horrendous what is happening there,” Mr Hamed, who claimed political asylum in Ireland in the late 1990s, said.
“My brother told me it is a massacre – they are using anti-aircraft weaponry against unarmed civilians and the hospitals cannot cope with the number injured. He said the international community must do something.”
Mr Hamed was one of many Libyans living in Ireland who took part in a 200-strong rally outside the GPO in Dublin yesterday to highlight the violence in Libya.
Tawfiq al-Ghazwani, a Dublin-based member of the National Congress of Libyan Opposition, who moved to Ireland after spending 10 years in prison for political activism, said friends in Benghazi had told him they remain defiant.
“After over 40 years of oppression maybe this is our chance to liberate ourselves forever from the dictatorship,” he said. “We will only know how many have died when we try to bury them.”
Mr al-Ghazwani said there had been no rioting or looting in the city, and the uprising was being led by judges and lawyers “with the elite” of the country.
Another Libyan living in Ireland, a businessman who did not want to be named, has also been in contact with people in Benghazi.
He talked of the use of anti-aircraft weapons against civilians and the presence of mercenaries from sub-Saharan countries hired by the regime. “They call them the people of yellow hats – they wear them to protect against stone-throwers, they dress like civilians and have guns under their clothes.
“At the moment people are so terrified, Gadafy is brutal . . . It is like ethnic cleansing.”
He said his cousin, a doctor in a Benghazi hospital, was very worried.
“The blood supply is running out and they are also running out of other medical supplies. They have opened the back garden and put beds out there on the ground and they are filling the yard,” he added.
Last night the US state department advised US citizens to defer nonessential travel to the country.