In Libya, mystery shrouds suspect’s handover
The transfer of a Libyan suspect to the United States to stand trial in the 1988 Lockerbie airliner bombing has stoked tensions in Libya, where some in the divided country saw the handover, under murky circumstances, as an abduction rather than an extradition.
The United States said Sunday that the FBI had arrested the suspect, Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud, in connection with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which was bound for New York from London when it exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing all 270 aboard. American prosecutors say Mas’ud delivered to accomplices the suitcase containing the bomb used in the attack.
It was not immediately clear who had handed Mas’ud over to the Americans. Libya has for years been a fractious country with competing governments in the eastern and western parts and a host of regional militias also exercising local control. The internationally recognized interim government, based in the country’s west, has not commented on the transfer, and little is known about the role Libyan authorities played. U.S. officials did not provide details of the handover.
But the possibilities that a militia turned him over or that the interim government did so to shore up U.S. support were criticized in some corners of Libya.
“Does this gang think that handing over a Libyan citizen through abduction will make the government last longer?” an eastern Libyan politician, Ahmed al-Sharkse, wrote on Twitter. Sharkse is an opponent of the interim government, which is based in the capital, Tripoli.
The Libyan Parliament on Monday accused anyone involved in Mas’ud’s capture and handover of “high treason” and demanded that the public prosecutor take legal action.
The interim government, headed by Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Dbeiba and backed by the United Nations, was formed last year to try to overcome the country’s divisions. But the Parliament is based in the city of Benghazi in eastern Libya, a competing power center in territory controlled by a militia leader.
The Dbeiba government “insists on going ahead with selling everything for the sake of staying in power in a stark violation of the rule of law,” read a post on Twitter from Zahra’ Langhi, a member of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum, the group that led to the creation of the interim government.
Others were upset the transfer had dredged up one of the most troubling chapters in Libya’s modern history — a terrorist attack that turned the country into an international pariah for years — and which many hoped had been put to rest.
Mas’ud, a former intelligence officer in the regime of Moammar Gadhafi, the longtime Libyan dictator, was freed from prison in Libya this year after serving a 10-year sentence on charges of working against the revolution that toppled the dictatorship. About a month ago, his family claimed that he had been abducted from his home in Tripoli by gunmen in plainclothes.
Emadeddin Badi, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Atlantic Council, a think tank, said he had learned independently that Mas’ud had been handed over to an armed group loyal to the interim government after being taken from his home.
“This cannot be called an extradition, per se,” Badi said. “It’s more of a deal.”
Badi said that he believed the Dbeiba administration was eager to curry favor with Washington to shore up the government’s precarious position. Parliament has declared the government in Tripoli illegitimate after elections last year were scrapped.