[The following are excerpts from a report in today's edition of The Guardian:]
Abdullah Senussi, Muammar Gaddafi's brother-in-law and intelligence chief, must have been an easy choice for the prosecutor of the international criminal court: his close association with the worst excesses of the Libyan regime goes back many years, and he reportedly played a key role in attempting to crush the Benghazi uprising when it began, in February.
Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the ICC prosecutor, described Senussi as Gaddafi's "righthand man, the executioner". But Senussi was more than a hard man in one of the most repressive regimes in the post-cold war world: his brief extended to political and PR strategies after Gaddafi abandoned terrorism and his WMD programmes in 2003 and sought a complete makeover. (...)
Until now, Senussi's most notorious exploit was as mastermind of the bombing of a French airliner over Niger in 1989 in which 170 people were killed. That led to a 1999 case in which he was convicted in absentia in France. He has been unable to travel abroad freely since then.
In the 1980s, he headed Libya's external security organisation, in which capacity he was said to have recruited Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the man convicted of the 1988 Lockerbie bombing, in which 270 people were killed. Like Megrahi, Senussi is a member of the powerful Megarha tribe. He is also a cousin of Abdel-Salam Jalloud, one of Gaddafi's oldest comrades.
I doubt that there is sufficient evidence against Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi, but if the ICC Judges approve arrest warrants for Abdullah Senussi and Col Gaddafi, I predict:
ReplyDeletea. that, having been convicted in absentia for the bombing of UTA Flight 772 of 19 September 1989, Senussi will be arrested by French Special Forces and imprisoned in France; and,
b. that, since FBI Director Robert Mueller is being pressed to stay en poste by President Obama, Col Gaddafi will be arrested by US Special Forces and put on trial in America for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 of 21 December 1988.
Unfortunately, it has been proven that the FBI's Thomas Thurman fabricated the evidence against Libya in respect of both PA 103 and UT 772 bombings.
So Gaddafi is unlikely to be convicted in America and Senussi's conviction in France really ought to be overturned.
You can find more information on UTA flight 772 on our webpage: http://www.uta772air.ch/
ReplyDeleteAn amazing account of how Abdullah Senussi came to be framed and convicted of the UTA Flight 772 bombing can be read here: Fabricated Evidence of Libyan Terrorism by Pierre Péan from Le Monde Diplomatique of March 2001.
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