DFA chief raises alert level in Libya to 4

FILE: The four Filipinos evacuated this morning by @PhinLibya from Tripoli are now in Tunis and will be repatriated later this afternoon by a team from @DFAPHL. Another 29 Filipinos in Tripoli will be repatriated in the next several days. (Photo: Elmer G Cato/Twitter)

As tensions continued to flare up, Foreign Affairs Secretary Teodoro “Teddy Boy” Locsin, Jr. on Wednesday, May 1, said he already raised the alert level in Libya to four.

“Yesterday informed President that I raised the Alert Level to 4 in Tripoli + 100 kms around. More mortar fire, more Filipinos hurt,” Locsin said in a tweet.

Alert level four requires mandatory repatriation of overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) in the North African country, but Locsin said the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) cannot “compel” them to go home.

“What is mandatory is that DFA stays in Tripoli until last OFW goes—& then it stays,” he added.

The country’s top diplomat earlier ‘begged’ Filipinos in Libya to leave due to the rising violence in the area.

[READ: DFA chief ‘begs’ Filipinos in Tripoli to evacuate amidst violence]

Locsin made the appeal after Chargé d’Affaires Elmer Cato urged more than 60 OFWs working at the Ali Omar Ashkr Hospital in Esbea and their dependents to evacuate the place as it was “no longer safe” there.

“Please don’t want for more artillery rounds to fall. Please move to the Embassy now,” Cato had tweeted.

As per Cato’s latest update, 13 OFWs who are carpet factory workers were sent back to the Philippines by their employers. This, he said, raised the number of repatriated Filipinos to 32 since the fighting began last April 4.

On Tuesday, Cato informed the public in a tweet, saying that the ability of Philippine Embassy in Libya to assist Filipinos in distress “becomes more difficult or even impossible to carry out.”

“That’s why this early we ask our kababayan (fellow countrymen) to let us help lead them out of harm’s way,” he said.

Cato had said the Philippine Embassy has ‘doubled’ its efforts to convince more than 1,000 Filipinos who are in the Libyan capital of Tripoli to fly back to the Philippines.