ICC building in the Hague/FILE
While the ICC wants Seif, the only son of the slain Libyan leader in custody, to be tried in The Hague, Libya’s post-revolutionary authorities insist they are willing and able to put him on trial in his home country.
A probe “has already produced considerable results,” Libya lawyer Philippe Sands told a two-day hearing on Seif’s fate. “There is a wide range of evidence that will constitute an indictment the same as that presented by the ICC’s prosecutor.”
The ICC issued an arrest warrant for Seif, 40, and Gaddafi’s former spymaster Abdullah Senussi, 63, in June 2011 for crimes against humanity committed while trying to crush the popular revolt against the veteran leader’s iron-fisted rule.
Evidence against Seif includes how he told Libyan security forces during a television broadcast to use violence shortly after the outbreak of the uprising in mid-February last year, Sands said.
Tripoli also alleges that Seif ordered the use of live rounds against civilian demonstrators and that he recruited Pakistani mercenaries to put down the revolt.
Seif has been in custody in the northwestern Libyan hilltown of Zintan since his arrest last November in the wake of the uprising that toppled his father after more than 40 years in power.
Senussi was extradited to Libya last month from Mauritania, where he was arrested in March as he tried to enter the country from Morocco using a Malian passport under a different name.
Tripoli and the ICC have been at loggerheads since his capture over where Seif al-Islam’s should be tried, with Libya’s new leaders saying they want him in the dock before one of their courts.
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