Tarhuna, Libya: A year ago armed men took Mohamed al-Magri’s son for questioning as fighting raged around the Libyan capital, and now he fears Haitham was killed and buried in a mass grave. Magri believes the masked men took his son at gunpoint in revenge, because his family backed the 2011 revolution that ousted Libyan strongman Moamer Kadhafi, and plunged the country into chaos. Haitham, who kept parakeets, was 20 at the end of 2019 when the men took him for questioning, said his father. The United Nations voiced “horror” after the first mass graves were found in June, and demanded that authorities carry out “transparent investigations into all alleged cases of unlawful deaths”. According to Magri, most people he spoke to believe that Haitham was “executed and thrown into one of the mass graves”.

Source: The North Africa Journal November 16, 2020 13:41 UTC