In the new Libya, former prisoners guard their onetime captors

TRIPOLI, Libya — The prison is a vast, unmarked complex of beige buildings, topped with sandbags and surrounded by high, wire-rimmed walls. Most of the guards wear their beards long and unkempt in the style associated with Islamists — exactly the kind of people that Moammar Gaddafi and his intelligence chief, Abdullah al-Senussi, used to keep locked up.

But if ever there was a picture of poetic justice in post-Gaddafi Libya, this is it. The prison’s chief, Mohamed Gweider, is a former Islamist insurgent who spent more than a decade in a Libyan prison. Two of the guards who tortured him, he says, are now his prisoners, and the biggest prize is Senussi himself.

Latest stories from Foreign

Infrastructure failings clip the wings of Indonesian airport

Ben Bland

FT.com | Planning, land acquisition and coordination problems hinder similar key projects nationwide.

Israel warns Syria to halt attacks after exchange in the Golan Heights

William Booth and Loveday Morris

The clash took place along a cease-fire line in the region, raising fears of a spillover from the Syrian war.

Afghan peace process stalled by larger fears

Pamela Constable

As the Taliban steps up attacks, the prospects for negotiated settlement to the conflict appear dim.

Speed limit proposal for autobahn strikes some as simply un-German

Michael Birnbaum

In the land of BMW and Porsche, the right to drive fast on the highway is viewed by many as inalienable.

British debate over EU could complicate Irish ‘bandit country’

Jamie Smyth | Financial Times

Dublin and Belfast fear lives could be at risk in Ireland if London pulls out of EU law enforcement agreements.

It would be “impossible’’ for Libya to send such captives abroad, Gweider said, even though Senussi and another prisoner, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, a son of the late dictator, are being sought by the International Criminal Court for mass killings and other atrocities alleged to have taken place during Libya’s 2011 revolution.

The Libyan government has adopted the same defiant stance, vowing to try the men on Libyan soil as testament to the country’s successful transition from dictatorship to democracy. For now, the international court has suspended a demand that Gaddafi be handed over immediately, pending a decision on a legal challenge mounted by the Libyan government. But legal experts warn of potential perils if Libya and its hodgepodge of new leaders prove unwilling to comply with international law.

The role reversals in Libya that have put former prisoners, opposition leaders and outlaws into positions of power point to a vacuum that legal experts say the ICC should fill in countries such as Libya, where doubts remain about the prospect of a fair trial for suspected war criminals.

Most of Libya’s prisoners had been “held for more than a year without charge or due process rights, including judicial review and access to a lawyer,” Human Rights Watch said in its 2013 World Report, released last month. Detainees in some facilities reported “repeated torture and deaths in custody,” according to the report.

Across the country, many of the men who guard some 8,000 prisoners, seized during and after Libya’s eight-month revolution, are former rebels or former prisoners themselves. The top posts in the Libyan government and security services are peppered with former members of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an extremist group that battled Moammar Gaddafi’s regime sporadically throughout the 1990s.

Former members of that extremist group have also established a new national guard, which controls at least part of the complex where Senussi is held, according to two people who have visited the facility and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. (Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, once considered his father’s heir apparent, is in another prison in the mountain town of Zintan, held by the Libyan rebels who caught him.)

‘I should be taking revenge’

Hanan Salah, a Libya researcher at Human Rights Watch who has met with Gweider and other justice and prison officials, said there is nothing inherently problematic with former fighters running Libya’s prisons. But the lack of training and vetting, to ensure that guards don’t have records of abuse, is a problem, she said.