BEIRUT: Human Rights Watch called on Lebanon Tuesday to release a son of Libya’s former dictator Muammar Qaddafi, saying he had been held on “spurious charges” for eight years.
Lebanon in 2015 arrested and accused Hannibal Qaddafi, known for living the high life, of withholding information about the disappearance of Lebanese Shiite cleric imam Mussa Sadr in 1978.
But HRW said he was only two years old at the time the cleric disappeared, and accused Lebanon of subjecting him to an “apparent arbitrary detention on spurious charges.”
“Spending eight years in pre-trial detention makes a mockery of Lebanon’s already strained judicial system,” the group’s Hanan Salah said in a statement.
Sadr — the founder of the Amal movement, now a main ally of militant group Hezbollah — went missing during an official visit to Libya, along with an aide and a journalist.
Beirut blamed the disappearances on long-time Libyan strongman Muammar Qaddafi — overthrown and killed in a 2011 uprising — and ties between the two countries have been strained ever since.
“It’s understandable that people want to know what happened to imam Sadr,” Salah said. “But it is unlawful to hold someone in pre-trial detention for many years merely for their possible association with the person responsible for wrongdoing.”
A Lebanese judicial official slammed the HRW report as “biased and one-sided,” telling AFP it was based solely on “information obtained from Hannibal Qaddafi’s defense team.”
Hannibal Qaddafi is “detained in a purely judicial matter,” the source continued, charging that he was responsible for prisons during his father’s rule, “including the one in which the imam was held.”
In June, a judicial official had told AFP that the case of Hannibal Qaddafi had been halted as they awaited information from Libyan authorities.
In August, Beirut received a letter from Libyan authorities demanding Qaddafi’s release, but a judicial source told AFP that he would not be freed before Tripoli revealed information about Sadr’s disappearance.
Later that month, Amal movement chief Nabih Berri accused Libya of “failing to cooperate” with the Lebanese judiciary and “concealing” information about the case.
Rights group urges Lebanon to free Qaddafi’s son
https://arab.news/6uq2q
Rights group urges Lebanon to free Qaddafi’s son
- HRW accused Lebanon of subjecting him to an “apparent arbitrary detention on spurious charges”
- “Spending eight years in pre-trial detention makes a mockery of Lebanon’s already strained judicial system,” the group’s Hanan Salah said
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
The UN says Al-Hol camp population has dropped sharply as Syria moves to relocate remaining families
- Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade
DAMASCUS: The UN refugee agency said Sunday that a large number of residents of a camp housing family members of suspected Daesh group militants have left and the Syrian government plans to relocate those who remain.
Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s representative in Syria, said in a statement that the agency “has observed a significant decrease in the number of residents in Al-Hol camp in recent weeks.”
“Syrian authorities have informed UNHCR of their plan to relocate the remaining families to Akhtarin camp in Aleppo Governorate (province) and have requested UNHCR’s support to assist the population in the new camp, which we stand ready to provide,” he said.
He added that UNHCR “will continue to support the return and reintegration of Syrians who have departed Al-Hol, as well as those who remain.”
The statement did not say how residents had left the camp or how many remain. Many families are believed to have escaped either during the chaos when government forces captured the camp from the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces last month or afterward.
There was no immediate statement from the Syrian government and a government spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.
At its peak after the defeat of IS in Syria in 2019, around 73,000 people were living at Al-Hol. Since then, the number has declined with some countries repatriating their citizens. The camp’s residents are mostly children and women, including many wives or widows of IS members.
The camp’s residents are not technically prisoners and most have not been accused of crimes, but they have been held in de facto detention at the heavily guarded facility.
Forces of Syria’s central government captured the Al-Hol camp on Jan. 21 during a weekslong offensive against the SDF, which had been running the camp near the border with Iraq for a decade. A ceasefire deal has since ended the fighting.
Separately, thousands of accused IS militants who were held in detention centers in northeastern Syria have been transferred to Iraq to stand trial under an agreement with the US
The US military said Friday that it had completed the transfer of more than 5,700 adult male IS suspects from detention facilities in Syria to Iraqi custody.
Iraq’s National Center for International Judicial Cooperation said a total of 5,704 suspects from 61 countries who were affiliated with IS — most of them Syrian and Iraqi — were transferred from prisons in Syria. They are now being interrogated in Iraq.
