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and five from Madaripur -- have been missing since March 2024, months after they travelled to Libya from Bangladesh through human trafficking networks that promised them jobs in Europe. They are aged between 18 and 30.

Their families do not know whether they are being kept in detention camps or traffickers’ hideouts in Libya or drowned in the Mediterranean during perilous journeys to Europe.

For many families in Shariatpur, migration to Italy is more than an aspiration; it is woven into the social fabric. In Naria upazila, locals even refer to an area as “Italy Village” because nearly every family there has one of its members living in Italy.

Human traffickers are well aware of this. They target families with modest landholdings, migrant workers in the Gulf, and young men desperate to make fortunes abroad.

Rashedul was one of them.

He had been working in a restaurant in Saudi Arabia since 2021, but Italy was always his preferred destination, said his father Selim.

“I did not want him to go [to Italy]. I knew the dangers,” said Selim, alleging that two local brokers -- Rashed Khan and Tunnu Khan -- trapped his son after he returned home from Saudi Arabia in 2023.

The family eventually paid around Tk 12.5 lakh to the brokers. Selim had to sell cattle, mortgage land, borrow money from relatives, and even transfer ownership of 20 decimals of land to traffickers.

Rashedul was asked to take a trafficking route that is common now: from Bangladesh to the UAE, from there to Egypt and then to Libya, a country fractured by years of conflict and instability since the fall of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.

From the northeastern Libyan city of Benghazi, he was moved to Tripoli in the northwest and kept in what migrants call a “game ghar” -- a holding facility where fortune-seekers are kept confined before being sent across the Mediterranean by boat.

The last phone call from Rashedul came on March 22, 2024.

“He only said they were taking away their phones, then the line went dead,” Selim recalled.

Since then, there has been no trace of Rashedul.

“We repeatedly asked the brokers about our son. At first, they said my son was detained in Malta. Later, they claimed that he reached Italy,” Selim said.

Eventually, both the brokers disappeared and could no longer be contacted on their mobile phones.

In nearby Char Chatang village, Kamala Begum, a homemaker, has been waiting for information about her 25-year-old son Aminul Islam for over two years.

Aminul went to Dubai in 2020 before brokers convinced him that he could earn far more in Italy. He returned home in 2023 and later left for Libya through the same trafficking network.

The family paid traffickers nearly Tk 18 lakh in different phases before he was taken to a “game ghar”.

The last call from Aminul came in April 2024.

“He only said he had reached Tripoli and would talk later,” Kamala said, adding that the call lasted only a few seconds.

“I do not want money… I just want my son back,” she cried.

Stories like these intersect with a brutal trafficking system, which has thrived amid years of conflict and lawlessness across Libya.

The United Nations and rights groups have documented widespread torture, extortion, forced labour and arbitrary detention of migrants in Libya. Human traffickers often imprison migrants in camps and torture them, demanding ransoms from families back home.

They subject migrants to electric shocks and starvation, and film the torture sessions to force their families to send more money.

For Bangladeshi migrants, Libya has become both a transit point and a trap.

According to the UN, Bangladeshis are now among the largest groups attempting to cross the central Mediterranean to Italy. Thousands leave Libya each year despite the risks.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that more than 31,000 migrants, including Bangladeshis, have died or gone missing in the Mediterranean since 2014. Many bodies are never recovered.

The IOM and the Bangladesh embassy in Libya support repatriation of migrants once they are released from jail or freed from detention centres. But they don’t know exactly how many Bangladeshis are now languishing in Libyan detention centres.

For the families of the missing Bangladeshis, this uncertainty is perhaps the cruelest part.

They cannot mourn because there is no confirmation of death; nor can they hope because there is no evidence that their loved ones are still alive.

Several families said they faced intimidation after filing cases against local brokers and human traffickers.

More than a dozen cases were filed with courts in Shariatpur and Madaripur against the alleged traffickers. Two of them were arrested but later secured bail from court, they said.

Some families said traffickers retaliated by filing counter-cases against them, while others said they were intimidated into silence.

Afroza Akter, whose brother Atiqur Rahman went missing in Libya, said some of the traffickers initially tried to settle matters through local arbitration before going into hiding.

“They started threatening us after we held a press conference in November 2024, demanding that the perpetrators be brought to book,” she said.

With a faint hope of seeing their loved ones again, these families are weighed down by grief, yet life goes on.

Fathers return to the fields they mortgaged to finance the dreams of their sons. Mothers keep waiting for phone calls that never come. Children grow up unsure whether their fathers are even alive somewhere far away.