AMNESTY: LIBYAN MILITIAS TORTURE GADHAFI LOYALISTS, UPROOT RIVAL COMMUNITIES

February 15, 2012: Armed militias now rule much of Libya, Amnesty International said, accusing them of torturing detainees deemed loyal to the ousted regime of Moammar Gadhafi and driving entire neighborhoods and towns into exile.
Amnesty International quoted detainees as saying “They had been suspended in contorted positions; beaten for hours with whips, cables, plastic hoses, metal chains and bars, and wooden sticks and given electric shocks with live wires and taser-like electroshock weapons.”
At least 12 detainees had died since September after torture, Amnesty said. “Their bodies were covered in bruises, wounds and cuts and some had had nails pulled off,” the group said.
The report is a fresh blow to Libya’s new government, the National Transitional Council, which helped lead the anti-Gadhafi uprising that broke out one year ago this week and spiraled into a brutal, eight-month civil war.
Since the war’s end with the capture and killing of Gadhafi last October, the NTC has struggled to extend its control over the vast desert nation. It has largely failed to rein in the hundreds of brigades that fought in the war, many of which now run their own detention centers for those accused of links to Gadhafi’s regime.
Amnesty said it visited 11 detention camps in central and western Libya in January and February, and found evidence of torture and abuse at all but one.
Some 2,400 detainees remain held in centers controlled by the new Libyan government, but the militias are holding uncounted thousands more prisoners, Amnesty said. Most are in and around Tripoli and Misrata, the coastal city that saw some of the war’s most brutal fighting, it said. (Sources: AP, 16/02/2012)