The foreign ministry on Friday said that intense efforts were still underway to evacuate the remaining eight Greeks still in Libya, who were stranded at worksite at Gialo, deep in the desert. Though the site has its own private airstrip, Libyan authorities have so far refused planes permission to fly overhead or land.
This is the last remaining pocket of Greeks needing to be evacuated following Thursday's successful operations by sea and air that brought 4,500 people out of strife-torn Libya, including 276 Greek nationals.
Deputy Foreign Minister Dimitris Dollis, who has been in charge of coordinating the evacuation operations, said that he was in constant contact with the eight Greeks in Gialo, who are trapped there with ten Cypriot nationals and more than 200 colleagues of other nationalities.
"They are eight Greeks but it is as if they are 1,008. We attach as much importance to the eight as we did to the rest," Dollis underlined in an interview with NET television on Friday. Describing the efforts to extricate them from Gialo for the past three days, Dollis said the situation was comparable to that in Sarajevo in 1995, where there was complete chaos on all levels and intervention was extremely difficult.
source: ANA-MPA
