BEIJING, Feb. 25 (Xinhua) — Some 12,000 Chinese nationals have been evacuated from riot-torn Libya in the ongoing large-scale evacuation operations by Friday morning, Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs has confirmed.

“The evacuees were either flown back to China or transferred temporarily to politically stable countries neighboring Libya,” said the Chinese ministry in a statement late Friday.

Early on Friday, 451 Chinese evacuees were flown back to Beijing from Cairo, Egypt, in two separate chartered Chinese government planes. Before them, 83 other Chinese nationals flew to Beijing or Shanghai from the northern Egyptian port of Alexandria in two commercial flights on Thursday.