Thaindian News

London, Mar. 3 (ANI): Britain will today spearhead an emergency airlift of thousands of refugees stranded on Tunisia’s border with Libya, amid fears of a humanitarian disaster following Colonel Gaddafi’s bloody crackdown.

Three aircraft chartered by the British Government will fly ’shuttles’ between Tunisia and Egypt to repatriate up to 6,000 Egyptian workers who have fled the Libyan chaos, the Daily Express reports.

Aid agencies have warned of a mounting crisis as some 85,000 mainly Egyptian migrant workers have massed across the Tunisian border, with a further 40,000, desperate and hungry, waiting on the Libyan side.

France will join Britain in flying the migrant workers home after an appeal by United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon for an international airlift to prevent a ‘humanitarian crisis’ in the camps.

The Royal Navy Type 42 destroyer HMS York, currently in the rebel-held port of Benghazi in eastern Libya, is also assisting with the relief operation.

The Foreign Office said it has evacuated 43 people, of whom 11 were British.

International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell said: “There is a real danger that without urgent assistance the humanitarian situation on the Libyan border will deteriorate rapidly.”

“We are ready to hand out weapons to a million, or two million or three million, and another Vietnam will begin. It doesn’t matter to us. We no longer care about anything,” the Daily Express quoted him, as saying further.

Meanwhile, Gaddafi is estimated to have personally squirreled away billions from Libya’s oil revenues, though he has insisted that he is ready to have his accounts verified.

He claims that his salary is only 465 dinars (322 pounds).

“My riches are the Libyan people, I have no assets,” he said. (ANI)