[1][2][3][4] The Egypt–Israel barrier, designed to keep out African migrants, caused the Rashaida traffickers to lose income from transporting refugees to the border, so they started to concentrate on kidnappings.
In 2014, Egyptian security forces fought unrelated insurgent networks committing terror attacks in the peninsula, and the kidnapping of refugees moved to Libya and elsewhere.
[5] Amnesty International published a report about numerous kidnappings in 2011-2013 in the Shagarab refugee camps in eastern Sudan, carried out by members of the Rashaida tribe, with victims being sold off to gangs in Sinai, where they would be brutally mistreated to extract ransoms.
A 2011 CNN documentary reported on Eritrean refugees who had paid Bedouin traffickers for transport to Israel but were instead held in bondage before their organs were harvested.
[2] German journalist Michael Obert visited the region in 2013,[11] met a victim and a torturer and talked to an activist of the New Generation Foundation for Human Rights in Al-Arish.