meetings with Tajani and Meloni- Corriere.it

Libyan general Khalifa Haftar arrived in Rome for meetings with the Italian government. The military leader, a former general in Gaddafi’s army, controls a large part of Cyrenaica and has a political agreement with Tripoli’s premier Abdelhamid Dbeibha. Haftar met Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani in the evening and should also meet Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Thursday morning. The premier had been in Tripoli on 28 January with the foreign and interior ministers, Tajani and Matteo Piantedosi, for an initial contact with the various Libyan authorities, but she had not managed to move to the Benghazi area where she its bases Haftar, who is considered one of the decisive men in Libya’s political and security order.

In the new data from the Interior Ministry – reported by Agenzia Nova – Libya is the second country of departure after Tunisia, as regards the arrivals of migrants by sea in Italy. There were 16,637 arrivals as of May 2, since the beginning of the year, in any case an increase of 166 percent compared to the 6,237 landed in the same period last year. More than half of the new arrivals, around 10,000, left from Cyrenaica, the eastern region of Libya dominated by General Haftar.