News
Saif al-Islam Gadhafi Captured
Saif al-Islam was being held in Zintan but would be transported to Tripoli soon, according to al-Alagi.
A spokesman for the Zintan brigades, Bashir al-Tlayeb, who first announced the capture at a press conference in Tripoli, said the NTC, which took over governing the country after Gadhafi was ousted, would decide where Saif al-Islam would be tried.
“Saif al-Islam was caught with two aides who were trying to smuggle him into Niger,” al-Tlayeb said, adding that he had no information about al-Senoussi’s whereabouts.
The justice minister, however, said Saif al-Islam was captured closer to the Algerian border and the convoy’s destination was not known.
Saif al-Islam Gadhafi, at 39 the oldest of seven children of Moammar and Safiya Gadhafi, had long drawn Western favor in by touting himself as a liberalizing reformer in the autocratic regime but then staunchly backed his father in his brutal crackdown on rebels in the regime’s final days.
He had gone underground after Tripoli fell to revolutionary forces and issued audio recordings to try to rally support for his father.
The International Criminal Court had earlier said that it was in indirect negotiations with a son of the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi about his possible surrender for trial.
An ICC spokesman said the court was waiting for proof that Saif al-Islam had been captured but stressed Libya has a legal obligation to cooperate with the international arrest warrant.
“First we have to verify if it really is him and that he’s actually been arrested this time,” the spokesman, Fadi El Abdallah, said. “If they decide they want to try the suspect in Libya instead of at the ICC, there’s a necessary process.”
He said the Libyans could formally request that the case be transferred, then ICC judges would make a decision.
“The main criteria is that he generally be prosecuted for the same crimes,” the spokesman said. “For us there’s an obligation, a legal obligation under international law, for the national government to cooperate with the ICC.”
Libya’s Information Minister Mahmoud Shammam said the NTC had not taken an official position yet, but in his personal view, Saif al-Islam “is an outlaw and should be tried in front of the Libyan Court, by Libyan people and by Libyan justice.”
Copyright 2011. The Associated Press.
