The Current - Sunday Listen: The Outlaw Ocean exposes true crime at sea

Episode Date: June 8, 2025

<p>The Outlaw Ocean is an anthology podcast that plunges you into the vast and often lawless world of the open seas. Today we feature the first investigation of S2. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ian Urbina traces back the story of a young father and farmer who embarks on a perilous journey across the Mediterranean, only to discover why it’s called "the route of death."</p><p><br></p><p>You can find The Outlaw Ocean wherever you get your podcasts: <a href="https://link.mgln.ai/oo-tc" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">https://link.mgln.ai/oo-tc</a> </p><p><br></p><p>Plus, come back Tuesday to hear guest host Catherine Cullen’s conversation with the journalist behind these incredible investigations.</p>

Fighting for care doesn't stop when all the votes are counted. No, fighting for care is an ongoing commitment to Canadians. It's time to turn campaign promises into health care policy that delivers better outcomes for patients, doctors and communities. It's time to fix the system with real solutions to real health care challenges. The Canadian Medical Association is ready to help you get it done. Learn more at CMA.CA slash fighting for care.

This is a CBC podcast. Hello, it's Matt. Catherine Cullen is sitting in on the program on Tuesday and she will be talking to a great guest. The Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ian Urbina will be on the program to talk about the latest season of The Outlaw Ocean. This is a podcast that takes you into the shockingly lawless world of the open seas. Ian Urbina is a guy who repeatedly risks his safety to expose some of the darkest stories from the ocean. From real evidence of modern day slavery to the mind boggling effects of overfishing. He quit his stable job at the New York Times to keep chasing these sorts of stories. And in the lead up to Catherine's chat with him, we're going to bring you one of those

stories. Ian retraces the voyage of a young farmer and father of three from Guinea-Bissau. This young man hoped to lift his family out of poverty and like thousands of other migrants he saw hope on the other side of the Mediterranean. But he soon learns why his uncle warned him against taking what is known as the route of death. This is the first episode of the Outlaw Ocean Season 2. Does he have a ballpark sense of how many shots he heard fired during the whole incident? Combien de tirages a tu as entendu? Non, plusieurs, je ne les ai pas calculés.

Plusieurs. Trois, cinq? Plus que cinq. Plus de cinq balles. Plus de cinq balles. Minimum five, more than five. More than five? More than five. Minimum five, more than five. And was the shooting, did it occur over the course of one minute, ten minutes?

It lasted a long time. It lasted a long time, it's more than ten minutes. No more than ten, more than ten minutes. In 2021, over 30,000 migrants arrived in Italy after crossing the Mediterranean Sea. Many of these migrants came from sub-Saharan Africa, and when they try to head to Europe, they often go to Libya. Libya is a popular place for them to launch across the Mediterranean because the trip is relatively short and the traffickers there in Libya simply charge less than they do in places like Morocco

or Tunisia. But this crossing is also one of the most dangerous and that number 30,000 people doesn't take into account those who don't make it. Does he remember the date of the launch? Do you remember the date when you took the boat? No, we were on the 3rd of July. Mohamed David is one of those migrants who never landed in Italy. I'm talking to him through Pierre Qatar, a photographer and translator from my team. Mohamed David and about 130 others tried to make the crossing in a small inflatable boat called a Zodiac.

One of the others in the boat was a man from Guinea-Bissau named Aliou Kande. And he remembers seeing Aliou in the boat, did he talk to him? Did you see Aliou in the boat? Wait, I saw him. Wait, did you talk to him? Yes, yes.

In May of 2021, I traveled to Libya. I wanted to learn why so many migrants were trying to make this incredibly dangerous journey from Libya to Italy and to investigate the human rights abuses that were happening on the Mediterranean. I also wanted to know the EU's role in orchestrating these abuses and how that was connected to the thousands of migrants being held in Libyan prisons. All right, so then how long did it take between the bullet in his neck and he's dead? How long was that? How long did it take between the bullet and the death?

About an hour. An hour? Around an hour. Close to an hour. So he was bleeding out for an hour? Yes. So he had blood for an hour? One hour.

He had blood? Close to an hour. Aliou Kande died from a bullet wound to the neck inside a secret Libyan prison called al-Mabani. His death is just one of many. Every year, tens of thousands of migrants take the same risks and face the same profound dangers in their quest to reach a better life in Europe. Those that die are casualties in a proxy war that's being funded by the European Union and carried out by Libyan forces. My team and I spent months tracing Aliou's path from a small village in sub-Saharan Africa

to his death in Tripoli. I've been covering stories like this for decades and that reporting has taken me all over the planet. This investigation turned out to be one of the most dangerous of my career. The Aliu Kande's story starts in a small village in Guinea-Bissau, one of the poorest countries in Africa. Aliu's mother told us he was born on a Monday. He lived in the village in a small clay house with his wife Hava and two children. His father told us that he worked the fields and herded cattle on the family farm where they grew cassava, mangoes, and cashews.

Over the past few years, weather patterns had started to shift. The dry seasons were too hot. The rainy seasons were too wet. And the yields from their crops were getting steadily smaller. Therefore, skinny cows were hardly able to produce milk. Life on the farm was hard, and every season it seemed to be getting harder.

Aliyu's wife, Hava, said that he was tired of living in poverty. Hava was eight months pregnant with their third child at the time, and Aliyu was worried that he was failing before God to provide for his family. Aliou had two older brothers who had left Guinea-Bissau for Europe and had been sending money back home. He decided it was his turn to leave the village. Hava and the rest of his family supported the decision.

Aliou's father told him, whoever goes abroad brings fortune at home. Before leaving his village, Aliuh called his brother, Denbas, and asked for advice. Denbas had left Guinea-Bissau and made it to Italy, where he still lives. We asked Denbas about that phone call. He warned Aliyu against trying to follow him there. Getting to Italy would mean crossing the Mediterranean from Libya. Denbas said the trip was much too dangerous. He told Aliyu that the safest route to Europe would be from Morocco to Spain where their other brother lived.

The trip would be more expensive, but at only 14 kilometers, it would also be the fastest way. In September 2019, Aliyu Kande decided that the risk was worth taking and he began his journey. He carried a Quran, a leather diary, two pairs of pants, two t-shirts, and 600 euros. He was 28 years old. It took Aliou a month to cross Mali and Algeria before landing in Morocco. When he arrived, he discovered that the price to get to Spain was triple what he could pay. He called his family and asked for help.

There was no way they could afford it either. Aliou's only option was Libya. One of my overarching missions with the Outlaw Ocean Project is to chronicle the weird and wild world that exists offshore in all its different forms. And if that's our goal, then you have to cover the Mediterranean crisis. Specifically the tens of thousands of people that are trying desperately to cross the Mediterranean and get to Europe. I think it's important to point out that in some places at least, the criminalization of migration is a pretty new phenomena. If you go back even 10 years, there are plenty of places, including in Africa, where it used to be normal, legal, and sometimes even encouraged for people

to migrate between countries. That might be for seasonal work or for permanent moves by folks like Aliyu who hope to improve a family's fortunes. And now that kind of movement across borders is illegal. Okay, so couple the illegality of migration with the reality of climate change, which is a massive driver of migration, and reality of climate change, which is a massive driver of migration and you have a very scary situation. Academics estimate that over the next 50 years, 150 million people are likely to migrate and that movement will largely be driven by climate change.

And most of this climate migration will involve folks from poorer nations moving to richer nations. If you look to the Mediterranean, you can already see this happening, right? A lot of these migrants are headed for Italy in particular. According to the UN, 31,600 migrants crossed from North Africa to Italy in 2021. In 2022, that number was about 105,000. The most recent figures for 2023 put the number at around 153,000. Those are massive numbers of people coming from places like Bangladesh, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Gambia, Sudan.

They're migrating north to countries like Libya and trying to find their way across the Mediterranean to Europe from there. The Italian government has said that it believes there are upwards of 700,000 migrants currently in Libya hoping to make the trip. So how has the EU and Italy responded? Well, what they've done has been to try their best to prevent these migrants from ever touching European soil. And one of the ways that they've

done this is to outsource border enforcement to places like Libya. Frontex, the European border agency, has described its concern about what it calls a steady increase in irregular migration across the border. ...pay my money to have the EU's external border safeguarded, meaning my money for Frontex. ...accused donor-funded charity rescue ships of colluding with traffickers. Frontex is the EU Coast Guard and border agency, And its mission is to defend the sovereignty of EU external borders. That's Judith Sunderland. She's the associate director in the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. She's been researching human rights abuses against migrants and refugees

for more than a decade. refugees for more than a decade. The whole point of the agency is to defend the sovereignty of EU external borders. It now has a much larger role in that than ever before. Its budget has massively increased. I can tell you that in 2015, for example, Frontex had a budget of around 143 million euros and in 2022, its budget was over 750 million euros. So it has massively expanded its operations, it is also quite unabashedly clear in its main mission, which is really to detect what it calls illegal

crossings of external borders and prevent and deter those crossings. The blocking of other nationalities before they even reach EU soil is a bit of a reach. And yet, that's what Frontex is doing over the Mediterranean. Frontex will often say that its aerial surveillance saves lives and that by alerting relevant authorities, it is ensuring that people in distress at sea are rescued. But it's quite clear that the goal of this extensive network of aerial surveillance is not rescue, but rather interception.

When they see the migrant vessels, they call in the coordinates. They know that they would get in legal trouble if the coordinates were called directly to the Libyans. Instead, Frontex calls it into a national partner, typically the coastal nations, Malta, Spain, Italy, Greece, and those EU players on land, then hand off the coordinates to the Libyans. Then the Libyans dispatch the Libyan Coast Guard vessel to the coordinates, and they arrive to the scene where the migrant vessel is. On the other side, you have players like Doctors Without Borders, and they're coming at it

from the exact opposite direction, literally, geographically, and politically, and, you know, in terms of their goal. They're trying to rescue the migrants, get to the vessel, bring those migrants quickly on board and then head further out into international waters where the Libyans have less jurisdiction. Funtechs has a very clear policy

of not informing nongovernmental organizations when they detect a boat of migrants and refugees. Under international law, you are never allowed to return migrants or refugees to a place that has been deemed not a place of safety. And Libya has been ruled not a place of safety. It's a war zone. So it is a crime for ships, whether they're merchant vessels or the Doctors Without Borders folks, to take those folks to Libya. But Libya can bring them back there. They get captured within 90 miles from Libyan shores and brought back to Libyan gulags. It's worth thinking of the Libyan Coast Guard as a shadow immigration system for the EU. It's a proxy force. It's an outsourced

force that the EU uses to do its dirty work when it comes to migration control. Their interest is in intercepting the boats. It's not in rescuing people. It's not in ensuring that people are safe or treated as humanely or with dignity. They have threatened non-governmental rescue organizations who are out in the Mediterranean Sea. There is ample evidence of collusion between various Libyan Coast Guard units and trafficking and smuggling networks. So they have a very strong interest in intercepting people at sea and taking them back to almost certain detention in nightmarish detention centers in Libya where they are subjected to further extortion and forced labor and any, you know, all manner of violence.

Let me remind, this isn't international waters. The Libyans actually do not have the jurisdiction to do this legally, and yet they do. They've got the guns and they've got the power and the EU is willfully looking the other way when they make these threats, or they open fire on vessels over which they have no jurisdiction to demand that those migrants climb on board their ship.

You know, we've seen the Libyan Coast Guard use live bullets on people while they're trying to perform an interception which they will try to cast as a rescue. Fighting for care doesn't stop when all the votes are counted. No, fighting for care is an ongoing commitment to Canadians. It's time to turn campaign promises into health care policy that delivers better outcomes for patients, doctors and communities. It's time to fix the system with real solutions to real health care challenges. The Canadian Medical Association is ready to help you get it done.

Learn more at cma.ca slash fighting for care. This message comes from Viking, committed to exploring the world in comfort. Journey through the heart of Europe on a Viking longship with thoughtful service, destination-focused dining, and cultural enrichment on board and on shore. With a variety of voyages and sailing dates to choose from, now is the time to explore Europe's waterways.

Learn more at Viking.com. When Aliou arrived in Libya on December 10, 2020, he found a cheap place to stay with some other migrants in a slum called Gargoresh. Gargoresh is a kind of parallel universe in Tripoli that's home to tens of thousands of dark-skinned African migrants. Most of them, like Aliou, are from sub-Saharan countries. Aliu had a great uncle, Demba Balde, who had been living in Gargresh for years. When Aliu arrived in Tripoli, Demba helped him find work. My colleague Pierre spoke to him on the phone. For the next few months, Aliu worked as a house painter,

trying to save up the money he'd need to pay a trafficker to ferry him to Italy. Just like his two older brothers, Aliu's uncle, Demba, discouraged him from making the trip across the Mediterranean. Demba told him, that's the root of death. I wanted to see what was really going on in Libya and what the situation was like for Ali Ucande and all the other migrants forced to make these same life or death choices. And that meant going to Tripoli. My team landed in Tripoli in May 2021. I was joined by Pierre Qatar, the translator you heard earlier, my editor Joe Sexton, and another filmmaker named Mea Doles.

We arrive at the airport and security is there to greet us and immediately things are a little shady. Our passports are taken away, we're not allowed to stay with them and see what's being discussed. That already gave me pause. We get in the car, we head to not the hotel that we had chosen, but this other hotel that they insist we stay at. And you know, the next week is a series of, you know, a dozen similar sort of surprises of that sort that just become this escalating situation

where it's very obvious that the intention here is for us to not do our job, not to talk to people, not to report. But from my view, our mission remained. Our job was to investigate this murder, investigate this wider problem. And if we had to slalom around their hurdles, we were going to slalom around their hurdles. But we were not going to stop and not do the job. If we were, we were going to leave the country. But there was no reason to stay and sit in a hotel for two weeks.

["SHADOWSKILLS"] Gargash, historically, is a thriving section of the city with brick and mortar shops and the like. But in the last couple decades, at least, it has become also this other thing, which is the shanty town that houses tens of thousands of migrants who end up there. The sense I got from a dozen migrants, most of whom live in Gargash, is that as dirty and dark a place as it is, is actually the one place they feel safe,

because there are lots of them and they can disappear. The larger experience when you talk to the migrants about Tripoli is the overwhelming sense of fear that at any moment, anywhere outside of Gargoresh especially, they can be grabbed by anyone. There's a lot of different motivations for kidnapping and if you're a migrant, you walk around the city knowing that can occur. He wants to go closer to where he lives so he doesn't feel comfortable around here.

Mohammed David is the migrant you heard at the beginning of this episode. And his story isn't much different from Aliou's. He's originally from the Ivory Coast. After his wife gave birth to a son, it became harder and harder for Mohammed David to provide for his family. So he made the same decision Aliou did, to leave home and try to find a better life in Europe. He traveled through Burkina Faso and landed in Tripoli, where he saved up some money and paid a trafficker to bring him to Italy.

They were at the... They were in the same boat. And how did they're in the same boat? They were in the same boat. What kind of person was Aliou? How was Aliou? What was his character? He was someone who had a temperament.

He has the same personality. He said, um, Aliu was someone who was calm and nice. He was just like you. Same thing. Okay. And he was from Guinea-Bissau? Yes. So you speak Portuguese. Once we met Mohamed David, it didn't take long for us to realize that he was going to

be an incredibly valuable source. But he knew that talking to foreign journalists in public was a quick way of attracting the wrong kind of attention. He knew that undercover security was everywhere and that migrants were always at risk. My team had been assigned to security detail by the Libyan government and Mohammed David didn't trust them. He insisted that if we were going to talk with him, we needed to come to his home in Gargash. So we set up one of the early meetings with him in Gargash and we brought food. And one

of his terms was, look, you've got to lose the security. You can't come into Gargarash with your security detail and you certainly can't come near where I'm staying if you've got those guys in tow. The security guys had said, you're not allowed to leave our line of sight. So this put me in a bit of a bind. Obviously, I was going to lean towards Mohammed David, but ultimately what I said to the security guys was, look, you're gonna take me to this location. I'm gonna meet someone and then he's gonna walk me in

to where he's staying and we're gonna have dinner with him. I will never be further than 500 meters from you, but you will not see where I am exactly, because that's the term I struck with the migrant. And if you're not okay with that, then I'm sorry, but that's what I need to do so as to make him safe and make him feel safe. And that's what we did. We met Mohammed David on a street corner a couple blocks away from Gargresh. We walked through some alleys winding our way through the night into the depths of Gargresh. The

security detail was maybe a block away. And then once we got into Gargoresh, we did a couple of blind turns to shake them, and then went with Muhammad David sat down. The Libyan took them from the boat. And they took us to the prison. The more we talked to Muhammad David and other people who knew Aliou, the more a really clear picture of him started to come together. The impression I got of him was that he was quiet, kind of introverted and watchful, maybe a bit shy. He was a gentle young man who was quick to smile. He liked soccer and rap music. Don't forget he was a rural kid who'd lived most of his life on a farm in a remote village.

So he didn't have that kind of hardened street sensibility to him. He was also less mature than say, Mohammed David, or some of the others who were trying to undertake a similar journey to Europe. We'd been set up and filming for about 20 minutes and that's when my phone started ringing and things very quickly started going sideways. Can you hear me? So they kept beating you. They didn't want to give money.

We will walk back in one hour, we'll be fine. And they need to tell the police to leave us alone. The police just called me and told Ayub to leave us alone. We were talking and we were having a dinner. But I need you to... You gotta walk away are talking and we're having a chemistry, but I need you to go You gotta walk away. Can you walk away a little bit? The security detail had called the bosses of the security company the bosses had called local Clothes and plain clothes police around gargash who spy on these guys and there was this sort of growing

fury around Me and these Westerners who were in the depths of gargoresh talking to migrants. And so over the next 20 minutes, you know, I got increasingly angry screaming calls from various folks saying, where are you? We're gonna storm gargoresh to come get you. You're not allowed to be talking with them without us present, etc, etc. And I was saying, you know, we are only 500 meters away. We know where you are. If there's a problem, we will contact you. We can get out easily. Don't worry, we're fine. And you need to just calm down and

back off. And after about 30 minutes, when the threats escalated to a pretty high degree, I told my crew, look, we gotta pull out of here, because this is gonna make Muhammad David unsafe. And we pulled out. And that's when I got scolded on the street and yelled at by the police chief and he said he was going to recommend having us thrown out of the country for talking to migrants. And we went back to the hotel and that's when I got calls from the head of the security

company that had been put on us by the government and was further told that we had broken their rules. From there forward, we were officially put on house arrest. We were not supposed to talk further with migrants without permission. We were not supposed to talk with ambassadors or foreign officials. We were not allowed to go to certain parts of the city, including Gargoresh. We were not allowed to leave the hotel. Bottom line, the very people that were supposed to protect us were now sort of incarcerating

us and the very people that were, meaning the government officials, who were supposed to protect us were now sort of incarcerating us. And the very people that were, meaning the government officials, who were supposed to be welcoming us into the country and kind of facilitating our reporting were doing just the opposite. They were throwing up every obstacle in our way. So it was really pretty clear that this was going to be a tough reporting trip from there forward. Next time on the Outlaw Ocean, my team and I continue investigating the murder of Ali Uconde inside a migrant prison. And that investigation puts us directly in the crosshairs of a Libyan militia. This series is created and produced by the Outlaw Ocean Project.

It's reported and hosted by me, Ian Urbina. Written and produced by Michael Catano. Our associate producer is Craig Ferguson. Mix sound design and original music by Alex Edkins and Graham Walsh. Additional sound recording by Tony Fowler. For CBC Podcasts, our coordinating producers, Fabiola Carletti, senior producer, Damon Fairless. The executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. Tanya Springer is the senior manager and Arif Nourani is the director of CBC podcasts. Special

thanks to Pierre Qatar, Joe Sexton and May Adults. That's the first investigation coming out of the Outlaw Ocean season two, one of three episodes about the crisis unfolding in the Mediterranean and four investigations actually that they're going to be doing this season. If you liked what you heard, you can find the Outlaw Ocean wherever you get your podcasts. They will drop new episodes weekly until July 23rd. Don't forget to check our feed on Tuesday to hear Catherine Cullen's conversation with host and journalist Ian

Urbina. Thanks for listening.