ROME: Refugees are being held in cages in a former zoo in Tripoli before they are smuggled across the Mediterranean, according to a human rights organisation.
Currun Singh, the head of the Tripoli division of the World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT), said Libyan armed groups had crammed men, women and children into school classrooms and zoo enclosures adapted into makeshift prisons. Many of the women are forced into prostitution until they become pregnant, at which point they are thrown back into detention.
Mr Singh said many of the detainees eventually make the crossing to Europe.
"Tripoli zoo was taken over by an armed militia after the revolution and is being used to house sub-Saharan migrants," he said. "The conditions are indescribable.
"These migrants often don't have access to doctors and even when a condition is life-threatening, they can be denied care. There's scabies and TB."
Mr Singh, who has been based in Tripoli for two years after being invited by the EU to document human rights abuses, said conditions had become significantly worse in recent months.
Around 800 people perished in the Mediterranean recently in one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks. Survivors told how they had paid smugglers hundreds of pounds to escape Libya.
The OMCT has recorded dozens of torture cases in the 17 official detention centres in Libya, and in more than 20 makeshift prisons.
It has spoken to detainees who have been given electric shocks and burnt with cigarettes.