Libya: Militia Says Finds 200 Bodies in Mass Grave

Πηγή: This Day Live
By Reuters
Oct 6 2011


A military unit allied to Libya's new rulers said on Wednesday it had discovered a mass grave in Tripoli containing the bodies of more than 200 people who died in the chaos surrounding the rebel assault that ousted Mummar Gaddafi.

According to Reuters, Naji al-Issawi, a commander in a unit of Tripoli's military council, showed reporters two corpses exhumed from a cemetery which he said contained between 200 and 300 corpses.

Issawi said officials planned to dig up more of the site in the Gargarish district and start identifying the remains.

An official from the cemetery said the corpses had been collected from streets and hospitals following the rebel assault on the Libyan capital in late August.

One of the corpses displayed on Wednesday was largely decomposed and appeared to be clad in military fatigues and boots.

Issawi said a separate burial site elsewhere in the capital had been discovered and could contain as many as 700 bodies.

Since Gaddafi was toppled, more than a dozen sites have been identified as mass graves, including one at the capital's Abu Salim prison, site of a 1996 massacre of about 1,200 people that became a rallying point against Gaddafi in the early days of the Libyan uprising.

There have been conflicting reports of how those burial sites came into being. Even members of the country's ruling National Transitional Council (NTC) have disagreed.

New York-based Human Rights Watch has urged the NTC to halt excavations of such sites, warning that exhuming remains without proper forensic techniques could make it impossible to identify people buried in them.

Unfitting details about the discovered Abu Salim massive grave

Concerning the recently discovered massive grave of the Abu Salim prison victims, there are some details casting doubts on the incident.

According to Human Rights Watch and the Amnesty International the only existing eyewitnesses of the massacre are two persons: Hussein al-Shafa, who was inmate working as a cooker by that time and disclosed his experience to the organizations 

The other one is an anonymous member of the National Front for the Salvation of Libya (NFSL), an opposition political group based outside Libya.

Shafa stated that after the massacre "Cleanup began around 11:00 a.m. the next day, June 30, when security forces removed the bodies with wheelbarrows. They threw the bodies into trenches—2 to 3 meters deep, one meter wide and about 100 meters long—that had been dug for a new wall. “I was asked by the prison guards to wash the watches that were taken from the bodies of the dead prisoners and were covered in blood,” al-Shafai’i said. In 1999 security officials poured cement over the trench, he claimed, although he believed that they later had the bodies removed."

The NFSL member reported that after the massacre "refrigerator trucks from the Meat Transportation Company and the Marine Fisheries Company took bodies away. On June 30, a forklift loaded the last bodies into a container for trains."

Both descriptions indicate that ether the bodies should be under a (massive) wall, or had been taken away. 

According to the Huffington Post the place of the alleged discovered massive grave was "a desert field scattered with bone fragments" that "was found outside the walls of Tripoli's Abu Salim prison, where the victims were killed on June 26". 

France 24 reports: "A bone wrapped with rope and skull fragments scattered over a cactus-covered desert field are grim testament to a 1996 massacre of more than 1,200 prisoners by Moammar Gadhafi’s regime." 

Daily Mail says "The human remains - found in a desert field outside the notorious Abu Salim Prison in Tripoli - are believed to be those of prisoners massacred by Gaddafi's henchmen in 1996." 

According to the BBC's video the scene is the one of the following picture.

Dr Ibrahim Abu Shima of the NTC stated that the place was discovered after successful interrogations of former prison guards that they all depicted the same place. But the fact is that their confessions contradict both prisoners that accordingly differ in this part of their reports.

Finally, according to the CNN: "It was unclear, however, whether the site actually was a mass grave, as no excavation has taken place. Members of the media were shown bones at the site, but medics with CNN staffers on the scene said the bones did not appear to be human".

Deciding on the issue is premature but could it be a symbolic firework aiming to unify the rather fragmented rebels council offering at the same time a hard-proof justifying the rebellion that started from the relatives of the Abu Salim victims along their lawyers?