No fewer than 356 stranded Nigerians were yesterday brought home from war-torn North African country, Libya.
The evacuees came in two flights.
One more flight was being expected at 9:25pm with another batch.
The first flight was said to have landed at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport, Lagos by 2.00 am with about 178 Nigerians. The same number of passengers were also in another flight that arrived by 2.00 pm.
The aircraft that brought the returnees were owned by Nouvel Air and it is also the same airline that would bring the third batch of returnees, which is expected to be over 170, by 9.25 pm.
According to statistics of the evacuees, the first batch consisted of 157 men, 16 women and three children.
The second flight also came with 140 men, 36 women and two minors.
The returnees boarded their flights at Bjerba, a Tunisian city in the border between Tunisia and Libya as No-Fly-Zone has been declared in all Libyan airspace by NATO forces.
Many of the returnees arrived with travel certificates issued by the Nigerian embassies.
Most of the certificates were issued about three months ago, weeks before the crisis in Libya started, it was learnt.
According to them, this indicated that many Nigerians living in Libya have been longing for home but did not have money to buy air tickets and had obtained these certificates preparatory to return home.
"Many of them came back with travel certificates that were issued three months ago. This means that they have been longing to come home. The papers (travel certificates) they were holding were dirty. I saw one that was issued two and half months ago and when I asked the man holding it, he did not say anything coherent. The crisis is barely one month now.," a source said.
The number of Nigerians evacuated are now 1, 704 in addition to about 170 citizens that would have arrived later in the night.
NEMA said the Federal Government would continue to evacuate Nigerians till all of them were returned home.
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