“I don’t know her name or even if she is still alive. The guards prevented me from talking to her. She was one of a group of women being held in the yard of a detention centre about 60 kilometres west of Tripoli near the coast. While they were attempting to reach Europe, they were intercepted on the Mediterranean by the Libyan Coastguard and brought back to the detention centre.

Many of the women had severe burns on their legs. Sea water had splashed over the sides of the rubber dinghy and reacted with fuel that had been spilled on the floor of the boat where the women had been sitting. The prolonged exposure to this toxic mixture had caused the chemical burns.

The woman with the pink scarf had extensive injuries over her legs. She sat on the ground silently, her breathing shallow and the pain on her face palpable. The other women swatted away the flies landing on the damaged human tissue with their scarves. There had been an attempt to dress the burns with a dirty bandage.

One of the women whispered to me:

“We’re scared. No-one wants to stay here. We want to go back home. They are hurting us. They hit us…”

But she stopped talking when the guards moved in closer.

For some of the women it had been their third attempt to escape Libya by sea only to be intercepted by the Libyan coastguard and returned to a detention centre.

I don’t know what happened to the woman with the pink scarf. But without the medical care she so desperately needed, I doubt she is still alive.”

- Guillaume Binet, March 2017.

Guillaume Binet is a French photojournalist and the co-founder of Myop photo agency. He travelled independently to Libya in March 2017 to document the plight of migrants, refugees and asylum-seekers detained in Tripoli and its surroundings. He gained rare access to several detention centres, including those where MSF is providing medical care.

MSF has been unable to gain access to the detention centre where this woman, and many others like her, was being held. The surrounding area is too dangerous for the medical team to travel through.

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