On 5th of May the newly formed Libya Contact Group (LCG) – an entity that served as a bridge between the National Transitional Council, NATO and EU during the civil war – attended a meeting in Doha. There, except the representatives by the Arab League and the African Union another figure was present: Mussa Kussa.
Kussa who became known as “the envoy of death,”served as chief of Libyan Intelligence for many years and his name was connected with torture practicing for extracting information, someting that some times personally did. According to the former CIA director George Tenet, whose memoir, At the Center of the Storm, called Bush’s negotiations with Kussa “illustrative of the surreal world in which we had to operate”, many in the agency actually suspected Kussa as the master mind behind the Lockerbie bombing.
During the uprising in Benghazi – when he was Libya’s FM – he fled to the UK on a Swiss-registered private jet ,were he defected resigning from his position on 30 of March. At first, Cameron asserted that he should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity. But soon he left him go free and the international sanctions on his name were lifted.
It was alleged that Kussa could have been a double agent hired by the MI6 chief John Scarlett for ten years in the framework of the war on terror. Mussa had worked as a security specialist for Libyan embassies in Europe before being appointed as Libya's Ambassador to the United Kingdom in 1980 but he was expelled after stating in an interview with The Times newspaper that his government intended to eliminate two political opponents of the Libyan government, who were living in the UK.’
Kussa was present when Tony Blair invited Gaddafi to the UK back in 2004 terminating Libya’s isolation along with Bush, acting as a key figure in the normalization of relations between Libya and many NATO nations. By the time of his defection the Western- educated and English speaking FM was considered very useful as he was knowledgeable about how the Gaddafi administration functioned and the weak points that could be exploited to bring Gaddafi down. Kussa got his master’s degree at Michigan State University in the 1970s, and both his children, born in the United States, are American citizens.
Newly discovered documents in Kussa’s private office in Tripoli prove the close collaboration between Libya and Western intelligence as suspects were sent to the Abu Salim prison for interrogation along with a list of the questions to be asked. One of this persons is Abdel Hakim Belhaj, known in the documents as Abdullah al-Sadiq, who is now the military commander of the rebel forces in Tripoli. US and UK spy agencies built close ties with their Libyan counterparts, and also the US Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, abducted several suspected militants from 2002 to 2004 and handed them to Tripoli, while the UK’s MI6 apparently gave the Gaddafi regime details of dissidents. The documents belong to a period in time when Britain’s Tony Blair and US President George Bush lobbied hard to bring Gaddafi out of international isolation in the years after the 9/11 attacks.
Gaddafi was severely punished for his crimes with a brutal death, beaten, abused, sodomized and finally shot to the head. Despite that these acts consist definitely war crimes under the Geneva convention the world felt relief from the death of such a devilish dictator. The practice of living a cruel leader to face justice in the hands of his ex-victims send a strong message to the rest. Moammar who was lucky to be in the right side after the 9/11succeded to get his regime out of the isolation. But in turn he run out of lack under the Arab Spring outbreak as being a dictator amidst the neighbor uprisings, he found again himself seated on the wrong side. On the contrary, Mussa Kussa keeping himself in the right place on time he can enjoy the comforts in a luxurious hotel in Qatar, planning to leave for Jordan, and prossibly will remain at large, unpunished.
Source: (BBC) 'Libyan spy chief tracked to Qatar'
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