ROME (Reuters) -Nearly 500 migrants who tried to cross the central Mediterranean have been brought back to Libya, a spokesman for the U.N. migration agency said on Friday, two days after charity groups lost contact with the boat carrying them. "Libya is an unsafe port where migrants should never be brought back," Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman for the U.N.'s International Organisation for Migration (IOM) wrote on Twitter. He told Reuters there were 485 migrants and they docked in the Libyan port of Benghazi on Friday. In a separate incident, German charity SOS Humanity said 27 migrants were picked up at sea by an oil tanker and illegally taken back to Libya. Under international humanitarian law, migrants cannot be forcibly returned to countries where they risk serious ill-treatment, and widespread migrant abuse has been extensively documented in Libya.
