Thirty-four bodies exhumed from a mass
grave near the town of al-Qawalish in western Libya seem to be those of men
detained by pro-Gaddafi forces in early June 2011, Human Rights Watch said
today.

The evidence strongly suggests the
detainees were executed at that time, before the pro-Gaddafi forces fled from
the area, in the Nafusa mountains. The bodies of another three who seem to have
been executed by the same perpetrators have also been discovered nearby.
Witnesses told Human Rights Watch the victims hadbeen detained from or near
their homes or at a major checkpoint in the area, and included at least nine men
aged over 60, including an 89-year-old man. The majority were from the nearby
town of al-Qal'a.

"The mass grave at al-Qawalish contains
further evidence strongly suggesting that Gaddafi loyalists carried out mass
executions of detainees as they struggled to suppress the uprising," said Peter
Bouckaert, emergencies director at Human Rights Watch. "These victims included
some very old men, some executed together with their sons."

During a visit by Human Rights Watch to
the region shortly after pro-Gaddafi forces had fled the area on July 6,the new
authorities in towns near al-Qawalish furnished the names of 173 missing men,
including 81 from al-Qal'a. Villagers and investigators from the ad hoc regional
council for the Nafusa mountains said the fate of the missing was not
established until rebels captured a Gaddafi loyalist whose mobile phone
contained a video clip showing the bodies of men, bound and blindfolded, lying
in a forest clearing. Relatives of many of the missing from al-Qal'a told Human
Rights Watch they recognized some of the dead in the video, and recognized the
location as a forest behind a Libyan Scouts base on the western edge of al-Qawalish.

The Libyan Red Crescent Society conducted
the exhumation beginning on August 20, with the consent of the National
Transitional Council (NTC), the de facto authority that controls most of Libya.
An investigative team from the Nafusa mountains regional council was also
present. Twenty-seven of the 34 bodies were subsequently identified.

The exhumed bodies were blindfolded with
hands tied. The discovery of bullet casings at the site suggests the captors
shot the men with automatic gunfire before burying them in a shallow common
grave. Near the mass grave is a separate grave containing three more bodies that
have not yet been exhumed, but have been tentatively identified based on
footwear and other physical evidence.

Human Rights Watch has interviewed three
men from al-Qal'a who were detained at the Scouts base, as well as five family
members of others who were detained and later apparently executed, and who had
witnessed their arrests. The accounts collected by Human Rights Watch describe
widespread house raids and arrests by the pro-Gaddafi forces, often in apparent
retaliation for losses suffered by the Gaddafi forces at the hands of those
supporting the NTC, as well as brutal beatings and torture by the Gaddafi forces
of those detained at the base.

Mohammed Ramadan al-Barghout, 34, a
physics teacher, told Human Rights Watch on September 10 that he had been
detained by Gaddafi loyalists at his house in Umm el-Jershan in early June and
taken to the Scouts base. He said he had seen about half of those later found in
the mass grave alive in detention when he arrived, and that he had witnessed the
brutal beatings of two brothers, Emhammed Al-Shatour, 17, and El-Hasmi Al-Shatour:

Emhammed Al-Shatour was beaten until his
leg was broken. They were beating him in front of his father to try and make the
father confess, right after I arrived at the Scouts base. They just grabbed
Emhammed and tied him up and started beating him with a stick on his leg, a
heavy wooden stick. His brother El-Hasmi was being beaten at the same time in
the next room. They brought the boys' father to witness the beating so he would
talk and give them information. Two or three soldiers were doing the beatings
until they got tired, and then others came to take over. Their father was
crying, saying he didn't know anything about the rebels. The Gaddafi soldiers
were calling them rats, saying "you rats brought NATO, you dogs."

Both sons and the father were among the
victims who were exhumed.

The Gaddafi forces freed Mohammed al-Barghout
the same day they arrested him, but two days later he fled home after learning
that Gaddafi supporters were returning there to re-arrest him. After he fled,
the soldiers went to his uncles' house and detained his two uncles, Saleh al-Khamoushi,
50, and Miloud al-Khamoushi, 53. The soldiers then went to his father's house
and detained his father, Ramadan al-Barghout, 77. All three were among the
victims found at the mass gravesite at al-Qawalish. A third uncle of Mohammed
al-Barghout, Ahmed al-Khamoushi, 33, was detained at the Scouts base checkpoint
in early June after returning from Tunisia, and was also among those found in
the mass gravesite.

A second witness, Zekri Salah al-Azeibi,
54, a retired school teacher, explained to Human Rights Watch the circumstances
in which four of those executed were detained: his brother Abdel Qassim Salah
al-Azeibi, 47, Abdel Qassim's son Ashraf Abdel Qassim al-Azeibi, 19, and nephew
Salim Suleiman Ali, 30, as well as a family friend, Abdel Hamid Gerada al-Aribi,
27. On June 6 the family decided to flee their homes due to approaching
fighting, and drove to the Scouts base checkpoint towards Tripoli. At the
checkpoint, the four men were detained, while the women and children were
ordered to return to al-Qal'a, driven by another male relative. The family
believes that Abdel Qassim may have been detained in order to rob him, as he was
known to be a wealthy gold dealer and had more than one kilogram of gold in his
car at the time. All four of the detained men are among the execution victims
found in the mass grave.

Some of those detained at the Scouts base
remain missing, and are also believed to have been killed. Omar SaadKhozam, 53,
a postal worker, told Human Rights Watch he was detained at the Scouts base on
June 3, as he returned from postal duties in Tripoli. He described how he
witnessed the beating of one detainee, Yusef Mohammed Ajal, who was tied to a
door frame and beaten until he lost consciousness. Afterwards, the Gaddafi
forces took away the lifeless body of YusefAjal, who remains missing. Omar
Khozam described the beatings he suffered:

The way they treated us was really bad -
I had to seek medical treatment after I was released and still can't see from my
left eye. They made me take off my shirt and whipped me with electrical wire,
and then they rubbed salt into the wounds to increase the pain. They wouldn't
even let us pray. And whenever some of them passed by and heard I was from al-Qal'a,
they would come and beat me. Another detainee, I don't know his name, was bound
to a window and whipped with cables, and kicked. When they beat us to the
ground, they would continue kicking us with their boots. They whipped and kicked
us like this all the time, especially when they lost some of their soldiers in
battles.

Although it remains unclear which forces
were in command of the Scouts base, former detainees interviewed by Human Rights
Watch said the majority of the soldiers at the base belonged to the "Civil
Guard" (Haras al-Sha'bi). Graffiti around the base identified their unit as the
"Storm Forces." The Civil Guard is a paramilitary group with a relationship to
the revolutionary committees of the Gaddafi government.

However, former detainees said that
members of the Libyan intelligence agencies were also present at the base. One
detainee, who was briefly transferred from the Scouts base to a detention
facility in Tripoli, told Human Rights Watch that the officers who transported
him identified themselves at checkpoints as belonging to the "Main Operations
Room of Abdullah Sanussi," referring to Libya's then-intelligence chief.
Detainees added that members of Libya's external intelligence service had also
been present at the base, in possession of lists of people who were suspected of
being in contact with anti-Gaddafi elements in Tunisia.

In addition to the Libyan Gaddafi
loyalists at the base, one of the detainees and two persons who witnessed
arrests said foreign African mercenaries were present, both at the Scouts base
and during arrest raids. They said they knew they were foreigners because of
their tribal scars and foreign accents and names.

Source: Allafrica.com