Human Rights Watch (HRW) urged Libya on Wednesday to investigate the suppression of a prison revolt 10 years ago during which hundreds of inmates are believed to have been killed.
”Hundreds of prisoners were apparently killed at Abu Salim prison” on June 28 and 29 1996, HRW’s Middle East and North Africa director Sarah Leah Whitson said in a statement.
The New York-based rights watchdog said that a decade later, Tripoli has failed to release details of the killings, the number of dead and their identities.
HRW said it had interviewed a former inmate who worked in the prison kitchen at the time, and who estimated that prison security officials gunned down up to 1 200 prisoners and disposed of the bodies.
The rights group quoted a Switzerland-based Libyan organisation as saying that just 112 families have been notified by the authorities of the death of a relative held in Abu Salim at the time.
”The families of missing prisoners have the right to know their relative’s fate,” Whitson said. ”The government must cooperate in shedding light on this tragic event.”
In a sign of reform in March this year, Libya released all 84 jailed members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood movement, who had been held since the late 1990s.
Libya’s ties with the West have improved dramatically since leader Moammar Gadaffi announced in December 2003 he was renouncing ambitions to acquire weapons of mass destruction.
But the regime continues to impose serious curbs on human rights, invoking state ideology to restrict freedom of expression and detain dissidents such as Fathi al-Jahmi, who faces the death penalty for criticising Gadaffi. — Sapa-AFP