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Tag: Libya government

  • Libya militia held Lockerbie suspect before handover to US

    Libya militia held Lockerbie suspect before handover to US

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    CAIRO — Around midnight in mid-November, Libyan militiamen in two Toyota pickup trucks arrived at a residential building in a neighborhood of the capital of Tripoli. They stormed the house, bringing out a blindfolded man in his 70s.

    Their target was former Libyan intelligence agent Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, wanted by the United States for allegedly making the bomb that brought down New York-bound Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, just days before Christmas in 1988. The attack killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground.

    Weeks after that night raid in Tripoli, the U.S. announced Mas’ud was in its custody, to the surprise of many in Libya, which has been split between two rival governments, each backed by an array of militias and foreign powers.

    Analysts said the Tripoli-based government responsible for handing over Mas’ud was likely seeking U.S. goodwill and favor amid the power struggles in Libya.

    Four Libyan security and government officials with direct knowledge of the operation recounted the journey that ended with Mas’ud in Washington.

    The officials said it started with him being taken from his home in the Abu Salim neighborhood of Tripoli. He was transferred to the coastal city of Misrata and eventually handed over to American agents who flew him out of the country, they said.

    The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals. Several said the United States had been exerting pressure for months to see Mas’ud handed over.

    “Every time they communicated, Abu Agila was on the agenda,” one official said.

    In Libya, many questioned the legality of how he was picked up, just months after his release from a Libyan prison, and sent to the U.S. Libya and the U.S. don’t have a standing agreement on extradition, so there was no obligation to hand Mas’ud over.

    The White House and Justice Department declined to comment on the new details about Mas’ud’s handover. U.S. officials have said privately that in their view, it played out as a by-the-book extradition through an ordinary court process.

    A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity in line with briefing regulations, said Saturday that Mas’ud’s transfer was lawful and described it as a culmination of years of cooperation with Libyan authorities.

    Libya’s chief prosecutor has opened an investigation following a complaint from Mas’ud’s family. But for nearly a week after the U.S. announcement, the Tripoli government was silent, while rumors swirled for weeks that Mas’ud had been abducted and sold by militiamen.

    After public outcry in Libya, the country’s Tripoli-based prime minister, Abdul Hamid Dbeibah, acknowledged on Thursday that his government had handed Mas’ud over. In the same speech, he also said that Interpol had issued a warrant for Mas’ud’s arrest. A spokesman for Dbeibah’s government did not answer calls and messages seeking additional comment.

    On December 12, the U.S. Department of Justice said that it had requested that Interpol issue a warrant for him.

    After the fall and killing of longtime Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in a 2011 uprising-turned-civil war, Mas’ud, an explosives expert for Libya’s intelligence service, was detained by a militia in western Libya. He served 10 years in prison in Tripoli for crimes related to his position during Gadhafi’s rule.

    He was released in June after completing his sentence. After his release, he was under permanent surveillance and barely left his family home in the Abu Salim district, a military official said.

    The neighborhood is controlled by the Stabilization Support Authority, an umbrella of militias led by warlord Abdel-Ghani al-Kikli, a close ally of Dbeibah. Al-Kikli has been accused by Amnesty International of involvement in war crimes and other serious rights violations over the past decade.

    After Mas’ud’s release from prison, the Biden administration intensified extradition demands, Libyan officials said.

    At first, the Dbeibah government, one of the two rival administrations claiming to govern Libya, was reluctant, citing concerns of political and legal repercussions, said an official at the prime minister’s office.

    The official said U.S. officials continued to raise the issue with the Tripoli-based government and with warlords they were dealing with in the fight against Islamic militants in Libya. With pressure mounting, the prime minister and his aides decided in October to hand over Mas’ud to American authorities, the official said.

    Dbeibah’s mandate remains highly contested after planned elections failed to happen last year.

    “It fits into a broader campaign being conducted by Dbeibah, which basically consists of giving gifts to influential states,” said Jalel Harchaoui, a Libya expert and an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. He said Dbeibah needs to curry favor to help him remain in power.

    More than a decade after the death of Gadhafi, Libya remains chaotic and lawless, with militias still holding sway over large territories. The country’s security forces are weak, compared to local militias, with which the Dbeibah government is allied to varying degrees. To carry out the arrest of Mas’ud, the Dbeibah government called on al-Kikli, who also holds a formal position in the government.

    The prime minister discussed the Mas’ud case in a meeting in early November with al-Kikli, according to an employee of the Stabilization Support Authority who had been briefed on the matter. After the meeting, Dbeibah informed U.S. officials of his decision, agreeing that the handover would take place within weeks in Misrata, where his family is influential, a government official said.

    Then came the raid in mid-November, which was described by the officials.

    Militiamen rushed into Mas’ud’s bedroom and seized him, transporting him blindfolded to a detention center run by the SSA in Tripoli. He was there for two weeks before he was given to another militia in Misrata, known as the Joint Force, which reports directly to Dbeibah. It’s a new paramilitary unit established as part of a network of militias that support him.

    In Misrata, Mas’ud was interrogated by Libyan officers in the presence of U.S. intelligence officers, said a Libyan official briefed on the interrogation. Mas’ud declined to answer questions about his alleged role in the Lockerbie attack, including the contents of an interview that the U.S. says he gave to Libyan authorities in 2012 during which he admitted to being the bomb-maker. He insisted his detention and extradition are illegal, the official said.

    In 2017, U.S. officials received a copy of the 2012 interview in which they said Mas’ud admitted building the bomb and working with two other conspirators to carry out the attack on the Pan Am plane. According to an FBI affidavit filed in the case, Mas’ud said that the operation was ordered by Libyan intelligence and that Gadhafi thanked him and other members of the team afterwards.

    Some have questioned the legality of Mas’ud’s handover, given the role of informal armed groups and a lack of official extradition procedures.

    Harchaoui, the analyst, said Mas’ud’s extradition signals the U.S. is condoning what he portrayed as lawless behavior.

    “What the foreign states are doing is that they are saying we don’t care how the sausage is made,” he said. “We are getting things that we like.”

    ———

    Associated Press writer Ellen Knickmeyer in Washington contributed to this report.

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  • UN envoy: Signs of Libya’s partition grow, election needed

    UN envoy: Signs of Libya’s partition grow, election needed

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    UNITED NATIONS — The U.N. special envoy for Libya warned Friday that signs of partition are already evident in the troubled North African nation and urged influential nations to pressure Libya’s rival leaders to urgently finalize the constitutional basis for elections.

    The first anniversary of the vote’s postponement is coming up later in December, said Abdoulaye Bathily, who stressed that if there is no resolution, an alternative way should be found to hold elections.

    Oil-rich Libya plunged into chaos after a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi in 2011. In the chaos that followed, the county split into two rival administrations, each backed by different rogue militias and foreign governments.

    Bathily told the U.N. Security Council that the continuing disagreement between the two rivals — specifically, the speaker of Libya’s east-based parliament, Aguila Saleh, and Khaled al-Mashri, the president of the High Council of State based in the country’s west, in the capital of Tripoli — on a limited number of provisions in the constitution “can no longer serve as a justification to hold an entire country hostage.”

    If the two institutions can’t reach agreement swiftly, Bathily said, “an alternative mechanism” , can and should be used “to alleviate the sufferings caused by outdated and open-ended interim political arrangements.” He did not elaborate on what that mechanism could be.

    Bathily also said the Security Council needs “to think creatively about ways to ensure that free, fair, transparent and simultaneous presidential and parliamentary elections are organized and held under a single, unified and neutral administration, and that those who wish to run as candidates resign from their current functions to create a level playing field.”

    Libya’s latest political crisis stems from the failure to hold elections on Dec. 24, 2021, and the refusal of Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeibah — who led a transitional government in Tripoli — to step down. Subsequently, Libya’s east-based parliament, which argues that Dbeibah’s mandate ended on Dec. 24, appointed a rival prime minister, Fathy Bashagha, who has for months unsuccessfully sought to install his government in Tripoli.

    The presidential vote was postponed over disputes between rival factions on laws governing the elections and controversial presidential hopefuls. The Tripoli-based council insists on banning military personnel as well as dual citizens from running for the country’s top post.

    That is apparently directed at east-backed military leader Khalifa Hifter, a divisive commander and U.S. citizen who had announced his candidacy for the canceled December election.

    Bathily said individuals and entities that “prevent or undermine the holding of elections” must be held accountable, stressing that “this applies to acts committed before, during and after the election.”

    He warned that the unresolved political crisis in Libya “impacts people’s wellbeing, compromises their security, and threatens their very existence.”

    Signs of Libya’s partition, Bathily said, are ample — including two parallel governments in the east and west, separate security operations, a divided central bank, and growing discontent throughout the country “over the unequal allocation of the huge revenues of oil and gas of the country.”

    The protracted political crisis “also carries a serious risk of further dividing the country and its institutions,” he added.

    Bathily told the council that Saleh and al-Mashri had earlier agreed to meet under U.N. auspices in the city of Zintan on Dec. 4 to try and find a way out of the crisis but regrettably, the meeting was postponed “due to unforeseen logistical reasons as well as emerging political obstacles.”

    He said the U.N. is working to identify a new date and location for the meeting.

    U.S. deputy ambassador Robert Wood said Libya’s political transition “remains stuck” since the failure to hold elections.

    The past year has seen “continued manipulation of Libya’s oil resources and the diversion of revenues to fund militias in both east and west, instead of being used to benefit the Libyan people through building infrastructure, promoting a diversified economy, or improving services like health care and education,” he said,

    Leaders of institutions have been threatened and technocrats have been sidelined “in favor of a rotating cast of cronies,” he said.

    “Powerful Libyans have undermined the roadmap to elections, seeking only to protect their spheres of influence, presiding over turf battles among militias, criminal enterprises and foreign fighters, the horrific treatment of migrants, and the declining living standards of the Libyan people,” Wood said.

    He said it is imperative that all parties participate in discussions facilitated by Bathily and the U.N. political mission in Libya toward establishing a constitutional framework and a timetable for elections.

    Libya’s U.N. ambassador, Taher Elsonni, speaking last, told the Security Council that Bathily’s briefing was “only diagnosis, with no medication or healing in prospect.”

    “The international community should respect the desire of the Libyan people to put an end to the conflict, and it should support national initiatives in order to lay down a constitutional basis to conduct parliamentary and presidential elections as soon as possible and to spare no efforts or resources in order to end transitional periods,” Elsonni said.

    He called on the Security Council to support national efforts to bring all key players around one table in Libya to discuss the constitutional framework and a timetable to elections.

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  • With suspect in custody, spotlight returns to 1988 bombing

    With suspect in custody, spotlight returns to 1988 bombing

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    The announcement Sunday that a Libyan man suspected in the 1988 bombing of a passenger jet has been taken into U.S. custody put the spotlight back on the notorious terrorist attack and longstanding efforts to pursue those responsible.

    The suspect, Abu Agela Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, is accused of building the bomb that destroyed a Pam Am flight over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. The attack killed all 259 people aboard the plane and 11 on the ground. The majority of those killed were Americans.

    Thirty-four years later, the public’s memories of the attack have largely faded, despite developments in the case that have intermittently returned it to the headlines. Here’s a look back:

    HOW DID THE LOCKERBIE ATTACK HAPPEN?

    On Dec. 21, 1988, a bomb planted aboard Pam Am Flight 103 exploded less than half an hour after the jet departed London’s Heathrow airport, bound for New York.

    The attack destroyed the jet, which was carrying citizens of 21 countries. Among the victims were 190 Americans. They included 35 students from Syracuse University in upstate New York who were flying home after a semester abroad. To this day, the bombing remains the deadliest terrorist attack ever carried out on British soil.

    Investigators soon tied the bombing to Libya, whose government had engaged in long-running hostilities with the U.S. and other Western governments. About two years before the attack, Libya was blamed for the bombing of a Berlin disco that killed three, including two U.S. soldiers, and injured dozens of others.

    WHO WAS HELD RESPONSIBLE?

    In 1991, the U.S. charged two Libyan intelligence officers with planting the bomb aboard the jet. But the country’s leader, Col. Moammar Gadhafi, refused to turn them over. After long negotiations, Libya agreed in 1999 to surrender them for prosecution by a panel of Scottish judges sitting in the Netherlands.

    One of the men, Abdel Baset Ali al-Megrahi, was convicted and given a life sentence. The other, Lamen Khalifa Fhimah, was found not guilty. Scottish officials released Al-Megrahi on humanitarian grounds in 2009 after he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He died in Libya in 2012.

    The families of those killed, meanwhile, brought suit against the Libyan government, demanding they be held accountable. In 2003, Libya agreed to a settlement, formally accepting responsibility for the bombing, renouncing terrorism and paying compensation to the families.

    Despite a rapprochement with the U.S. government, the pursuit of others responsible for the bombing largely stalled, until after Ghadafi was ousted from power in 2011.

    WHAT LED INVESTIGATORS TO MASUD?

    After Ghadafi’s fall, Masud, a longtime explosives expert for the country’s intelligence service, was taken into custody by Libyan law enforcement. In 2017, U.S. officials received a copy of an interview with Masud done by Libyan authorities soon after his arrest.

    In that interview, U.S. officials said, Masud admitted to building the bomb used in the Pan Am attack and working with the two men charged earlier to plant it on the plane. He said the operation had been ordered by Libyan intelligence and that Ghadafi had thanked him and others after the attack, according to an FBI affidavit.

    In late 2020, the U.S. Justice Department announced charges against Masud. With Masud in Libyan custody, though, his prosecution remained largely theoretical. U.S. and Scottish officials pledged to work for his extradition, so that he could be tried.

    It was not clear Sunday how Masud was taken into U.S. custody. He would be the first to appear in an American courtroom for prosecution of the attack.

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  • Police: 2 firefighters die in house fire, body found outside

    Police: 2 firefighters die in house fire, body found outside

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    WEST PENN TOWNSHIP, Pa — Pennsylvania State Police say two firefighters died responding to a house fire where a body was found, while two people who lived in the home got out safely.

    The slain firefighters were identified as members of the New Tripoli Fire Company, Assistant Fire Chief Zachary Paris, 36, and Marvin Gruber, 59, Trooper David Beohm said.

    The body of another person was discovered outside the house on the property, which sits on a large plot of land in in West Penn Township near Tamaqua in Schuylkill County.

    “We have a body in the back, and that’s all still part of this whole investigation,” Boem said.

    West Penn Township Police Chief James Bonner said two people — “an uncle and nephew” — lived in the three-story single-family home and were able to escape the fire. He said two other firefighters were treated for injuries.

    They said more than 100 firefighters and officers responded shortly before 4 p.m. Bonner called it an active crime scene, with Pennsylvania State Police and the federal bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms assisting the investigation.

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