BENGHAZI, Libya — At the small airport just outside Benghazi, Musa Faraj waited with dozens of others early Sunday, peering over the iron gates of the arrival hall. When he and the rest of the mostly male crowd spotted a planeful of passengers — many of them freed last week from Tripoli prisons — they let out a harmony of cries and chants.
Faraj’s joy came from seeing his son, Abdul Rauf. He was slim now, 40 pounds lighter than when the father had last seen him. But he was home.
“Sometimes I lost hope,” Faraj said. “I thought he was dead.”
The 25-year-old rebel fighter had disappeared on the front lines of the battle on the eastern coast in March — after peaceful protests against Moammar Gaddafi turned into a war — joining the thousands of people missing in Libya.
Many have been held for decades. Rebel leaders based here estimate that during the six-month-long conflict, nearly 60,000 more Libyans had disappeared. Even as they continue their search for Gaddafi, the rebels have opened his prisons in Tripoli, freeing thousands.
But only about 10,000 prisoners have been accounted for, rebel leaders say, leaving families and friends to fear that thousands are in underground prisons or, perhaps, in mass graves.
“Where in the world are they?” said Shamsiddin Ben-Ali, a spokesman for the Transitional National Council. “It’s a human crisis.”
A family’s wait ends
The Abu Salim facility in Tripoli, where Abdul Rauf was held for 48 days, was notorious within Gaddafi’s opaque prison system for its brutality, the place where many of his political opponents vanished.
In 1996, after inmates at Abu Salim revolted over their living conditions, 1,200 of them were massacred. And it was the arrest in February of a lawyer representing the families of those killed in 1996 that helped spark the uprising, which started in Benghazi and spread across the country.
After reuniting with his family members Sunday, Abdul Rauf told them that he was beaten and jabbed with electric prods every morning, from dawn until 10 o’clock, when he got a small piece of bread, some cheese, and, sometimes, a hard-boiled egg to share among six people. The first seven days, Abdul Rauf said, he was not allowed to use the bathroom and was given a bottle to use as a latrine.
He shared a small cell with 70 people, all sleeping on the floor, and he told men who had been locked up for years what was happening outside the prison’s iron gates and towering walls.
“There’s a revolution in the streets against Gaddafi. The people rose up,” he said he told them. The broken men finally had a glimmer of hope. They hugged him and wept, he said.
At the airport Sunday morning, just after midnight, male relatives crowded around Abdul Rauf, kissing and hugging him. He said that he had been transferred to the Tajura prison, also in Tripoli, and that guards secretly working against Gaddafi unlocked cell and prison doors the day rebels converged on the capital last week.
Neighbors stood at their gates waving as the young man rode past them with his father and uncle. Friends fired celebratory shots into the air. In the doorway of their home, his mother, Mariam Layas, and his sisters, Iman and Inas, waited in anticipation. When he entered the house, they showered him with kisses, hugs and tears while other female relatives cupped their hands over their mouths to trill with joy.
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