F., a Romanian working in Libya, told on Sunday how he managed to earch the Mettiga military airport in Tripoli, where he was due to spend the night waiting for a plane to transport him to Milan on Monday morning.

He told how he, accompanied by a Portuguese and a Serbian citizen, reached the Mettiga airport from a Gazprom facility in the desert. He was five minutes late to take a plane and reach Paris with other people on Sunday night.

He said the three of them received their passports five minutes late because organisers did not consider to wait for them, passport-ready, at the airport. A group of French urged the three to leave with them, but Libyan officials would not them leave without a passport. So it came that the three eventually remained alone in the whole airport.

They shut themselves in the airport waiting for a 9 a.m. flight from the Tripoli international airport to Milan, for which they managed to get reservation.

But beside the logistics and bureaucratic issues, there was a problem with thousands of people - Algerians, Egyptions and others - who did not have the necessary documents on the international airport.