India said Thursday a passenger ship with the capacity to carry 1,000 people had arrived on the Libyan coast to begin evacuating some of its 18,000 nationals in the violence-hit country.
NEW DELHI, Feb 24, 2011 (AFP) - India said Thursday a passenger ship with the capacity to carry 1,000 people had arrived on the Libyan coast to begin evacuating some of its 18,000 nationals in the violence-hit country."A ship has already reached the Libyan coast, and the plan is to evacuate Indians and take them to Egypt, from where we will fly them to New Delhi," an official in the foreign ministry told AFP asking not to be named.The evacuation was expected to begin shortly, but the process had been hampered by poor communications with the Indian embassy in the Libyan capital Tripoli, the official said.Of the 18,000 Indians living under Moamer Kadhafi's tottering regime, about 3,000 are reportedly in the eastern city of Benghazi working in automobile companies and in hospitals.Indian foreign secretary Nirupama Rao on Tuesday described the evacuation as "a mammoth operation"."We will have to not only put in place arrangements for aircraft or ships, but also obtain permission from Libyan authorities for our aircraft to land there," she added. There are about 60,000 Bangladeshis working in Libya, mostly low-paid contract workers in the construction industry.In Dhaka, foreign ministry spokesman Syed Masud Khandker told AFP that the impoverished country had no evacuation plans, but was trying to move its citizens to safe places."So far, we have news that Bangladeshi workers are safe and still we are trying to find a way to move them to safer places, so that if conditions deteriorate further, they will not be in danger," he said."It is still not clear what measure we will be able to take to evacuate them, we are hoping to move them to safety." Fears of a full-scale civil war in the North African country have prompted countries from Canada to China to scramble to charter ferries and planes to get their citizens out.
