THE FLIGHT of Irish citizens from Libya continued yesterday with five employees from Mercury Engineering arriving at Dublin airport, five days after they had left their camp.
They had been working on two airfields in the desert in the southeast.
Contracts manager Conor Molloy, from Athlone, said media reports were not showing the reality of what was happening in Libya. “Gadafy is massacring his people,” he said. “The United Nations needs to step in within the next 24 to 48 hours to help those people.”
He said the group had been trying to leave Libya for eight days and he was critical of the help from the Irish and British authorities. The information they received was “diabolical”, he said.
“They were telling people . . . book a flight online and get out but it was too late for that,” he said.
“They were advising people to go to Tripoli when Benghazi was safe ... I mean the Chinese evacuated 10,000 people. The Turks evacuated 3,000 people.
“The British and Irish struggled to evacuate 300 people.”
He said there were some scary situations with the looting of money, laptops and mobile phones. The group left their camp last Thursday and boarded a Brazilian-chartered ship in Benghazi on Saturday. They arrived in Athens on Sunday morning.
Financial controller David Sheerin from Wicklow town said the situation had deteriorated “very, very fast” in recent days and he was glad to be home. “It’s not going to be safe for a long time. I think there’s going to be a civil war,” he said.
The Department of Foreign Affairs said almost all Irish citizens who wanted to leave Libya had left by now. An Irish family was expected to fly into Baldonnel airport late last night from Malta and one or two more Irish people were expected home today.
The department said it had helped about 115 people to leave Libya since tensions escalated.
