[blue902]

Bedouin connection again:

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/News/Mid...#axzz1mfY17v50

Seems like straight out of the Mexican coyote playbook, with a nice Middle Eastern twist.

...Qamrawi said smugglers kept him and some 60 other men in a hut, shackled by their legs. Each day, about a dozen guards burst into the room, making them lie down naked, one at a time. Then the torture began. Qamrawi said he saw 16 men die under torture, screaming for help, because they took too long to gather the ransom money.

Other Africans say smugglers gang-raped migrants, electrocuted them, kept them in the desert sun, deprived them of food, threatened to remove their organs, shackled them together and left them unwashed.

They include a 27-year-old Eritrean who reached Israel in February. He limps on his deformed legs, cannot close his swollen hands and wonders whether he will ever be healthy enough to work again.

Smugglers beat him with pipes and electric prods and smeared melting plastic on him. Women in his group were taken outside to be raped. Six men died, their bodies left to rot beside him for days at a time.

"Every time I close my eyes, I think about all the people I left behind in the (underground) room. They always come to mind," said the Eritrean, who provided only his first name, Touldeh, fearing his captors could still harm him.

Israeli advocates say although the torture happens in the Sinai, Israel can do more for freed captives when they arrive in the Jewish state.

"Every minute that we are waiting, more and more people are being tortured," said Shahar Shoham of the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, which treats many new arrivals, including Touldeh, in a free medical clinic.

Some 50,000 Africans have entered Israel in recent years, fleeing conflict and poverty in search of safety and opportunity in the relatively prosperous Jewish state. They need the smugglers' help to navigate the rugged Sinai desert and reach Israel's border. The smugglers are nomadic Bedouin tribesmen.

For several years, smugglers ran a lucrative trade. But with Israel rushing to seal the border, smugglers are raising their prices as migrants try reach Israel before it's too late.

Africans say the journey to Israel begins in a shantytown in northern Sudan, where initial contacts with Bedouin smuggling tribes are made. Most smugglers keep their word and deliver them to Israel's border for a few hundred dollars...