The World Organization Against Torture accuses the Libyan authorities and militias of executions and torture
Sep. 28 (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Libyan authorities and the militias present in the country have been behind the murder of more than 580 civilians between January 2020 and March 2022, as reported by the World Organization Against Torture (OMCT), which has indicated that the figure includes executed in prisons and people tortured to death.
“The cases we have been able to document represent only the tip of the iceberg,” said OMCT Secretary General Gerald Staberock. “Extrajudicial executions of defenseless civilians, often accompanied by horrific torture, are now endemic in Libya as government agents and armed militias unleash indiscriminate violence with impunity,” he said.
Thus, Staberock has emphasized that “the world cannot remain complacent and allow these heinous crimes to become the new normal.” Of the total of 581 civilians killed, 487 died in the northern, eastern and western parts of the country, while the rest were killed in southern regions. The figure is added to the mass graves found in Tarhuna after the massacres in April 2019.
The report, entitled ‘That was the last time I saw my brother’, is based on interviews carried out over the past two years with witnesses and survivors by the Libyan Network Against Torture (LAN), a group of organizations of Libyan civil society.
“The documented cases were perpetrated by various actors and militias in the country”, the OMCT pointed out in its report, detailing that the deaths were due to “indiscriminate attacks on residential areas”, “executions in detention facilities”, ” deaths due to torture in custody” and “instances in which bodies were found dumped”.
In this way, he has highlighted that “the unifying element in these diverse contexts is a climate of almost total disregard for the rule of law in which those responsible can count on total impunity”.
“It is a climate in which justice is not only not applied, but actively blocked, and in which victims and their families have nowhere to go for protection or access to help or rehabilitation” , has explained.
“Instead, victims, their families or potential witnesses, attorneys, and those documenting violations face enormous and ongoing risk of retaliation in an environment described as ‘military norms,'” it revealed.
The organization has highlighted that the LAN “could not verify all the complaints received”, although it has praised that “it was able to document thousands of cases of torture and hundreds of deaths of arbitrarily executed or victims of forced disappearances that were later assassinated”.
“The LAN has also received information about the death of 99 civilians in 2020 as a likely result of indiscriminate attacks with heavy weapons, in violation of the rules of armed conflict, against residential areas in Tripoli, Zliten, Joms, Sirte, Sabha and Ubari. These deaths are not discussed in the report due to the difficulty of verifying all the information.”
Finally, he warned that “the prevalence of these crimes, most of which have not been investigated, not to mention tried or punished, leads to greater impunity for those responsible and reinforces the general feeling of vulnerability among the population. “.
