Libyan gangs are selling migrants for as little as £10 per person with the complicity of the , a shocking new report claims.

The migrants are held in Tunisian detention centres before being sold to militia and traffickers on the border with .

Women are sold for up to £75 each due to their value as sex slaves. Migrants are subjected to sexual abuse, torture and severe beatings that have left many dead, the researchers said.

A number of NGOs, including Border Forensics and On Borders, put together the dossier.

Entitled State Trafficking: Expulsion and Sale of Migrants from to Libya, it reveals the human cost of a crackdown last year that reduced the number of migrants arriving in Italy from North Africa by 59%.

Italy's prime minister, has hailed the steep drop in numbers as a triumph. Since 2017, Italy has spent almost €75 million (£62.8 million) on training and equipping Tunisia's border guards.

The investigation "sheds light on systematic human rights violations in Tunisia and Libya, with the complicity of the EU", said the NGOs.

They added: "The findings reveal a horrific logistical chain of abuse and exploitation, enabled by agreements between the EU and Tunisia."

The report claims that police and soldiers round up migrants in Tunisia's coastal cities. They are then placed on buses, with some manacled with plastic zip ties, and transported to the border with Libya.

Migrants have recounted how the police molested and sexually abused some of the women during the bus journey.

"On the buses, the Garde Nationale [Tunisian police] touch women. They touch our private parts; they rape women in front of men on the buses," said one migrant.

They are then held for a few days in detention camps near the border towns of Ras Jedir and Ben Gardane, which the Tunisian army or the Garde Nationale allegedly runs.

From there, they are taken to the border and sold to Libyan military officials or militia members, with payment normally made in money, fuel or hashish.

Tunisian police and Libyan militia reportedly refer to the captured migrants as "black gold", in a chilling echo of the transatlantic slave trade.

The migrants are then detained in squalid desert holding centres, while their captors contact their families demanding ransoms for their release.

One such prison is located near the town of Al Assah and is controlled by the Libyan Border Guard. The unit is a beneficiary of the Border Management Assistance and Training programme, the report said.

Those whose families are unable to pay are sold to local people and businesses, while others are subjected to savage beatings and torture. Many die and are buried in mass graves, according to the researchers.

Piero Gorza, an Italian human rights campaigner and one of the report's authors, said: "This is not some casual deviancy or collateral effect which has somehow eluded the authorities. It's a systematic phenomenon. It's state-sponsored slavery."

The report was presented by a group of Left-wing MEPs to the European Parliament in Brussels on Wednesday.

Estrella Galan, a Spanish MEP, demanded that the EU "confront this atrocity".

She told the : "It is an appalling act of irresponsibility that European funds are being used to facilitate the trafficking of human beings between Tunisia and Libya, reducing lives to mere commodities valued at just €12 [£10] to €90."