The Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, told the UN Security Council on Thursday that the court had issued 4 new secret arrest warrants for crimes allegedly committed in Libya since 2011.
Khan added, while submitting his semi-annual report on Libya to the United Nations Council, that in the past few weeks his office had submitted a request for the issuance of two additional arrest warrants, but the judges had not yet decided on the matter.
The notes are currently classified, and therefore it is not clear who they are targeting or what crimes the ICC prosecutor specifically accuses them of. The Public Prosecutor asked the judges to lift the confidentiality and awaiting the issuance of the decision.
The Security Council referred the situation in Libya to the International Criminal Court in 2011, and the court says on its website that the investigation focuses on alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in the country since February 15, 2011.
Last November, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, Karim Khan, confirmed that he had obtained evidence related to violations committed by the forces of retired Major General Khalifa Haftar, including extrajudicial killings, kidnapping and sexual violence.
Among these crimes, he added, are a large number of extrajudicial killings, kidnappings, mutilation of corpses, enforced disappearances, hostage-taking, sexual violence and looting, in addition to indiscriminate air strikes, the use of mines, human rights violations during military trials of civilians, and the destruction of property.
Since June 2020, the Libyan Authority for Tracing Missing Persons (governmental) has been discovering mass and individual graves in Tarhuna, and exhuming bodies and remains. And the most recent thing that the authority did was to exhume the remains of 6 unidentified people on the second of November.
Haftar’s forces are accused of being responsible for these graves during their control of Tarhuna between April 2019 and June 2020.
The International Criminal Court had demanded the extradition of Mahmoud al-Werfalli, a commander in Haftar’s forces, for accusing him of carrying out field executions of prisoners, while al-Werfalli was assassinated last March by unknown gunmen who intercepted his car and opened fire with their guns on him in the city of Benghazi.
