A group of 83 Chinese workers were evacuated on Wednesday from Libya and were heading home from the northern Egyptian port of Alexandria, the Chinese embassy in Egypt has said.

The first group of 43 left for Beijing by commercial flight at 1:25 p.m. (1125 GMT) on Wednesday.

The second group of 40 will fly to Shanghai by another commercial flight at around 5:30 p.m. (1530 GMT), the embassy said. All of the evacuated are workers with China Building Technique Group Co., Ltd., and had been working at a university construction site 500 km away from Benghazi.

Their compound was ransacked on Saturday and Sunday, and they had to rent 10 minibuses to go to the Libyan-Egyptian border. They arrived at the border on Tuesday night, and were received by Chinese embassy staff and transported to Alexandria on Wednesday morning.

"We are so lucky as one of the earliest group evacuated from Libya," Shi Zhifei, one of the workers, told Xinhua.

They worked on the Tubruq University construction project which was funded by the government of Libya, some 170 km away from the Libyan border with Egypt, Shi said.

In the past three days, their construction site has been looted by unidentified armed men for several times, and all the offices and dormitories have been burned down.

"Anyway, we got some help from our local friends and they managed to get some minibuses for us to get to the border," Shi said.

After nearly 11 hours of waiting, they finally crossed the border with the help of Chinese embassy in Cairo, and arrived at Egypt's second largest city of Alexandria on Wednesday morning.

The Chinese embassy in Cairo said on Tuesday that 12 shuttle buses had arrived at the Alsalloum crossing for the evacuation and another 50 buses would be mobilized to the border for more evacuations.

Embassy officials told Xinhua that a large number of Chinese nationals were stranded at the border area on the Libyan side.

Inspired by protests in Tunisia and Egypt, Libyan protesters started to rally in streets last week in a bid to end Muammar Gaddafi's 41-year rule, plunging the North African country into chaos and bloodshed.