Rwanda welcomes 153 asylum seekers evacuated from Libya
A group of 153 African refugees and asylum seekers evacuated from Libya arrived safely in Rwanda on Thursday night.
The group, aboard a Rwandair plane, came from five different nationalities which include: 82 Sudanese, 56 Eritrean, 5 Somali, 9 Ethiopian, and 1 South Sudanese.
They included men, mothers, children and teenagers who were decently dressed up and ready to start their next life of transition.
The Ministry in charge of Emergency Management (MINEMA) said on its X account that the group will be accommodated at the Gashora Transit Center, where other evacuees who arrived before are hosted.
The new arrivals are the 16th group to be received by Rwanda following another group of 169 (men, women and children) who also arrived in November, 2023.
Families of asylum seekers arrived in Kigali City Thursday night
The refugees and asylum seekers evacuation process is part of the Government of Rwanda, United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR), and the African Union’s Emergency Transit Mechanism (ETM), initiated in 2019, with the aim of saving lives of refugees and asylum seekers, which were in peril.
According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), at least 6,600 refugees in Rwanda have been “safely” resettled in third countries in 2023, following the the departure of 13 refugees on a flight bound for Toronto, Canada, on Wednesday, November 8, taking the total number of refugees resettled from Rwanda to 30,000 since 2010.
Asylum seekers supported by the UN Refugee Agency in Rwanda
