Rights group urges Lebanon to free Gadhafi’s son

Share:

Lebanon in 2015 arrested and accused Hannibal Gadhafi of withholding information about the disappearance of Lebanese Shiite cleric imam Mussa Sadr  © – / FAMILY ALBUM/AFP/File

Human Rights Watch called on Lebanon Tuesday to release a son of Libya’s former dictator Moamer Gadhafi, saying he had been held on “spurious charges” for eight years.

Beirut- Lebanon in 2015 arrested and accused Hannibal Gadhafi, 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.

Lebanese Shiite cleric imam Mussa al – Sadr  who was born in Iran  departed for Libya . On 25 August 1978 with two companions, Sheikh Muhammad Yaacoub and journalist Abbas Badreddine to meet with government officials at the invitation of Muammar Gaddafi. The three were last seen on 31 August. They were never heard from again. Gaddafi’s son , Hannibal Gadhafi was two years old at the time but has been in jail for 8 years without any trial . He is being accused of withholding information about the disappearance of the Shiite cleric.

Sadr — the founder of the Amal movement, now a main ally of the Iranian- backed 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 Moamer Gadhafi — 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 Gadhafi’s defence team”.

Gadhafi 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”.

The official said a delegation from the Libyan Ministry of Justice was expected to travel to Beirut in the coming days to meet with the Lebanese justice ministry and the committee overseeing the case to revive a memorandum of understanding from 2014.

In August, Beirut received a letter from Libyan authorities demanding Gadhafi’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.

France24/AFP

Share: