Cairo: Twenty-one Egyptian fishermen were released from Libya, an Egyptian official said on Tuesday, two days after a video emerged showing Daesh-linked militants in Libya beheading Coptic Egyptians.
“The fishermen were released after successful negotiations with the Libyan side,” Egyptian Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries Adel Al Beltajui said, without giving details.
He added that the Egyptians had left Libya on their way to the homeland.
The fishermen had been held more than a month ago by Libyan authorities for illegally fishing in the Libyan territories, according to Egyptian media.
On Sunday, Egypt imposed a ban on its citizens’ travel to neighbouring Libya after the release of the video depicting the decapitation of 21 Egyptian Christians abducted in Libya.
Hours later, Egypt mounted air strikes against targets of Islamist militants in Libya’s eastern town of Derna.
Egyptian President Abdul Fattah Al Sissi Tuesday urged the UN to authorize intervention in Libya with which Egypt shares a border of more than 1,000 kilometres.
Egyptian television quoted Al Sissi as saying in an interview with French broadcaster Europe 1 that he had repeatedly warned that Libya would “turn it into a hub for terrorism” that would not threaten Egypt but Europe as well. “We have to work together to overcome terrorism,” he said.
In Sunday’s gruesome video, a knife-wielding masked extremist vowed to conquer Rome.
Libya has rival governments, parliaments and militias, which have been locked in fighting for months.
Egypt is backing the internationally recognized government and parliament, forced by Islamist-allied militias to relocate from Tripoli to the eastern city of Tobruk.
Around 550 Egyptian expatriates have returned home from Libya via the border crossing of Al Salloum over the past two days, a border official said. “There is no mass exodus from Libya until now,” Mohammad Metwali, the head of the crossing, told Egyptian television.
There are no official figures about the exact number of Egyptians working in Libya. Independent figures put them at more than one million, mostly construction workers.