Outcry as Libya carries out public executions for first time since fall of Gaddafi

In the 15 years since the eruption of civil war in Libya and the fall of Muammar Gaddafi, not a single execution took place.

But in a dramatic change, the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) have executed 31 people since August - breaking a 15-year de facto moratorium. The killings are the first known executions since 2010 - with at least 50 more at imminent risk of being killed, according to human rights groups.

“After more than 15 years without a single execution, the LAAF has started putting people to death by firing squad after secret military trials,” Mahmoud Shalaby, regional researcher at Amnesty International, explains to The Independent. “That is a deliberate choice, and they must reverse it now.”

“These men were tried in secret, by military courts with no independence, on the strength of confessions allegedly extracted through torture. Some were killed even after an appeal court had spared their lives,” he added.

The killings began in August, when Major-General Fawzi al-Mansouri, one of the LAAF’s military intelligence chiefs, was killed in a car bombing on Benghazi. Two weeks later, the executions began.

On 23 August, the military prosecutor's office announced the executions of 10 people convicted of terrorism-related offences, with charges including belonging to banned organisations and participating in assassination attempts targeting Libyan military personnel.

But rights groups have cast significant doubt over the trials, and have called on the army to halt all executions. Amnesty says military courts have convicted hundreds of civilians in eastern Libya in the “grossly unfair” trials that are aimed at “punishing opponents and critics of the LAAF and its allies”.

Amnesty’s investigation found that confessions had been extracted under torture by the LAAF-affiliated Internal Security agency. Convictions were often based on these confessions.

The organisation says that detainees were forcibly disappeared and placed in incommunicado detention - meaning total isolation from the outside world, including loved ones and legal counsel - for up to two years. They would be tortured with electric shocks, burned, and beaten with plastic pipes in order to extract the confessions.

In at least two cases, the people executed had had their death sentence reduced to live imprisonment on appeal, meaning there was no legal backing for their execution, Amnesty said.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the trials were held without prior notice, with families and journalists barred from attending. Lawyers of choice were refused, and “those who did have their own lawyers were refused visits before and during trial and could not speak with them privately”, it added.

HRW added: “They were apparently not allowed to present their cases in court or examine the evidence against them. The verdicts were handed down without providing the defendants or their attorneys with written and reasoned judgments.”

Bassam Khawaja, the deputy Middle East and North Africa director at HRW, said each execution was an “irreversible injustice” and called on all governments with links to the LAAF to be “pressing hard to stop the next one”.

Many of the 31 that have reportedly been arrested so far, HRW says, were arrested in the eastern cities of Derna and Benghazi during a conflict between the LAAF and its opponents between 2014 and 2018. They were convicted in the following three years until 2021.

Libya is currently deeply divided between the UN-backed western government, based in the capital of Tripoli and known as the Government of National Unity (GNU), and the rival Government of National Stability (GNS), in eastern Libya which is aligned with the LAAF, and has received backing from Russia, Egypt and the UAE.

It had plummeted into chaos when a Nato-backed uprising toppled Gaddafi in 2011, leaving the country deeply divided, with both east and west backed by armed groups and foreign governments.

Mr Shalaby warned that “these executions show no sign that the LAAF intends to change course”, adding that if “Libya is reunified without accountability, the people responsible for these abuses will simply carry them into the new state”.

The demands of rights groups are clear. “Libya went more than 15 years without an execution, and the LAAF has shattered that moratorium in a matter of weeks,” Mr Khawaja added. “The lives of at least 50 more people now depend on whether Haftar’s forces, and the governments that back them, choose to stop this.”