LONDON — Scotland Yard will investigate whether British spies facilitated the abduction of two Libyan men who were allegedly shipped back to their homeland and tortured by the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s regime, authorities announced Thursday.
One of the men, Abdel-Hakim Belhaj, is now head of the Tripoli Military Council in the Libyan capital. The other, Sami al-Saadi, is also a former anti-Gadhafi activist.
The pair allege they were the targets of “extraordinary renditions” in 2004, in which Belhaj was detained in Thailand and al-Saadi in Hong Kong in covert operations and spirited back to Libya to face interrogation by Gadhafi’s security apparatus. Both men say British intelligence agents assisted in the kidnappings; Belhaj accuses the CIA of involvement as well.
Police and prosecutors in London said Thursday that the allegations of British complicity in rendition and torture were “so serious that it is in the public interest for them to be investigated now,” rather than waiting for the conclusion of a separate public inquiry into such alleged practices.
The two men’s accusations have been bolstered by documents found after the fall of Tripoli, the Libyan capital, to anti-Gadhafi fighters last year. Files discovered by the organization Human Rights Watch in the office of former Libyan intelligence chief Musa Kusa pointed to close cooperation between Libyan spies and their American and British counterparts.
Separately, authorities announced they would not be bringing charges against unnamed British intelligence agents accused of complicity in the alleged torture of terrorism suspects who eventually wound up at the U.S. military’s detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Police and prosecutors said there was not enough evidence to show the agents knew with certainty that mistreatment was happening when they participated in the questioning of the suspects.
