The reprisals could become a powerful element in persuading Gaddafi loyalists in the holdout city of Sirte to fight to the death, said Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based think tank.
While the rebels’ Transitional National Council has projected an image of reconciliation, confirmation of extrajudicial killings would be “an absolute nightmare for the rebels,” he said.
The Washington Post's Thomas Erdbrink gives a look inside an underground bunker built by one of Moammar Gaddafi's sons. (Aug. 25)
Executions by loyalists
The abuses have hardly been limited to the rebel side. Gaddafi’s troops apparently executed more than 100 political prisoners in two separate incidents before they fled, according to survivors.
Trader Abdel-ati Bin Halim, 42, said he had been arrested at a checkpoint in the coastal city of Zintan two weeks ago, taken into custody after his car alarm went off and soldiers accused him of signaling to NATO with the flashing lights.
After being bound, gagged and beaten, he was kept for a week with up to 200 other people, packed in a hanger at the Yarmouk military base in Tripoli, with only enough water for the oldest people to wet their lips. Then, as the balance of power in the capital started shifting toward the rebels, the guards said they were leaving the door open.
“ ‘Wait half an hour,’ then leave,’ they told us,” Bin Halim said. But when the prisoners pushed open the doors, they were greeted with a hail of machine-gun fire. As bodies piled up on the floor, Bin Halim took refuge behind some tires before making a run for safety with several others.
Escaping with bullet wounds to his knee and elbow, he eventually arrived at a hospital in central Tripoli. “I can’t believe I made it,” he said from his hospital bed.
Eltahawy said Amnesty had received “very strong testimony” to back up Bin Halim’s account. She said she believed at least 23 people had escaped out of a total of 150 or 160 captives from the incident he described, with four in the hospital.
At another hospital in Tripoli, doctors said they had received 17 bodies of people they believed were executed by their guards inside Bab al-Aziziyah as rebels advanced, in a similar but separate incident.
Hunting for Gaddafi
On Friday, rebels fought isolated pockets of resistance as Libyan special forces hunted for Gaddafi and his sons after clearing one of his loyalists’ last major strongholds in the capital.
The streets of Tripoli were largely deserted except for rebel fighters manning checkpoints. Rebels seemed to have control of most of the Abu Salim neighborhood, where they had routed Gaddafi loyalists the previous day. Black smoke billowed from the main market, and broken branches, glass, trash and bullets were strewn over the streets between shot-up cars and checkpoints.
Abdul Majid Mgleta, a rebel commander, said he expected the rebels to mop up the last remaining pockets of resistance in Tripoli within 72 hours, and said he hoped to capture Gaddafi in a similar time frame. “We have information from our own intelligence,” he told reporters in the capital.
In eastern Libya, rebel fighters remained stalled Friday outside the coastal oil terminal of Ras Lanuf, which was coming under rocket fire from pro-Gaddafi forces based in his home town and tribal power base of Sirte, about 130 miles to the west.
Overnight Thursday, NATO struck a surface-to-air missile launcher, 29 military vehicles and a major command post in and around Sirte, NATO officials said. They said they could not confirm ongoing operations on Friday for security reasons.
Correspondents Thomas Erdbrink in Tripoli and Leila Fadel in Benghazi contributed to this report.
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