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A powerful militia was involved in the secret detention and interrogation of a suspect in the 1988 shooting down of a Pan Am flight bound for New York over Lockerbie, Scotland, according to Libyan officials.
Around midnight in mid-November, Libyan militiamen arrived at a residential building near the capital Tripoli in two Toyota pickup trucks, officials said.
They said they broke into the house and brought out a blindfolded man in his 70s.
They targeted Abu Agila Mohammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, a former Libyan intelligence officer wanted by the US for allegedly planting the bomb that crashed Pan Am Flight 103 just days before Christmas 1988.
The attack killed 259 people in the air and 11 on the ground.
Weeks after the night raid in Tripoli, the United States announced that Masoud had been detained, surprising many in Libya, which has been split into two rival governments, each backed by an array of militias and foreign power support.
Analysts say the Tripoli government responsible for handing over Masoud may be seeking US goodwill and support in Libya’s power struggle.
Four Libyan security and government officials with direct knowledge of the operation recounted Masoud’s journey, which ended in Washington.
It all started when he was taken from his home in Tripoli’s Abu Salim neighborhood, officials said.
They said he was transferred to the coastal city of Misrata and eventually handed over to U.S. agents who flew him out.
The officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Some say the United States has been pressuring for months to hand over Mas’oud.
“Every time they communicate, Abu Agila is on the agenda,” one official said.
In Libya, many questioned the legality of how he was picked up and sent to the United States months after his release from a Libyan prison.
Libya and the United States have no standing agreement on extradition and are therefore under no obligation to hand over Masoud.
The White House and Justice Department declined to comment on the new details Masoud handed over.
U.S. officials have said privately that, in their view, it was a regulated extradition through ordinary court procedures.
A U.S. State Department official said Saturday that Masoud’s handover was legal, describing it as the culmination of years of cooperation with Libyan authorities.
Libya’s chief prosecutor launched an investigation after receiving a complaint from Masoud’s family.
But for nearly a week after the U.S. announcement, the government in Tripoli remained silent, while rumors that Masoud had been kidnapped and sold by militias persisted for weeks.
Following public protests in Libya, the country’s Tripoli Prime Minister Abdul Hamid Debeba acknowledged on Thursday that his government had handed over Masoud.
In the same speech, he also said that Interpol had issued an arrest warrant for Masoud.
A government spokesman for Mr. Dbeibah did not return calls and messages seeking further comment.
On December 12, the U.S. Department of Justice said it had asked Interpol to issue a warrant for his arrest.
Masood, an explosives expert with Libya’s intelligence services, has been detained by militias in western Libya after longtime Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi was toppled and killed in a 2011 uprising that turned civil war.
He is serving a 10-year sentence in Tripoli for crimes related to his position during Gaddafi’s rule.
He was released in June after serving his sentence.
Since his release, he has been under surveillance and has barely left his home in the Abu Salim district, an army official said.
The neighborhood is controlled by the Stabilization Support Bureau, a militia led by warlord Abdul-Ghani Kikli, a close ally of Mr Debeba.
Over the past decade, Amnesty International has accused Al-Kikli of war crimes and other serious human rights violations.
After Masood was released from prison, the Biden administration stepped up its extradition request, Libyan officials said.
At first, Debeba’s government, which claims to govern Libya as one of two rival governments, was reluctant, citing concerns about political and legal repercussions, an official in the prime minister’s office said.
U.S. officials continue to raise the issue with the government in Tripoli and their dealings with the warlords in their fight against Islamic militants in Libya, the official said.
The prime minister and his aides decided in October to hand over Masoud to U.S. authorities amid mounting pressure, the official said.
Mr Dbeibah’s tenure remains hotly contested after planned elections failed to take place last year.
“It fits into a wider campaign that Dbeibah is going on, which basically involves giving gifts to influential countries,” said Jalel Harchaoui, an expert on Libya and an associate research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute.
He said Mr Dbeibah needed to curry favor with him to help him stay in power.
More than a decade after Gaddafi’s death, Libya remains chaotic and lawless, with militias still dominating swathes of territory.
The country’s security forces are weak compared with local militias allied to varying degrees by Dbeibah’s government.
To arrest Masoud, the government of Dbeibah visited al-Kikli, who also holds a formal position in the government.
The Prime Minister discussed the Mas’oud case at a meeting with al-Kikli in early November, according to a Stabilization Support Bureau employee with knowledge of the matter.
After the meeting, Mr Debeba informed US officials of his decision and agreed to the handover within weeks in Misrata, where his family is influential, a government official said.
Then came the raid in mid-November, which officials described.
Militiamen stormed Mas’ud’s bedroom and seized him, blindfolded him, to an SSA-run detention center in Tripoli, officials said.
He remained there for two weeks before being handed over to another militia in Misrata, the Combined Forces, which reported directly to Mr. Dbeibah.
It is a new paramilitary unit formed as part of a network of militias backing him.
In Misrata, Libyan officials questioned Masoud in the presence of U.S. intelligence officials, a Libyan official with knowledge of the interrogation said.
Masood declined to answer questions about his alleged role in the Lockerbie attack, including a 2012 interview in which the United States said he had confessed to Libyan authorities that he was the bomb maker.
He insisted his detention and extradition was illegal, the official said.
In 2017, U.S. officials received a copy of a 2012 interview in which they said Masoud admitted to making the bomb and carrying out the attack on the Pan Am plane with two other accomplices.
According to an FBI affidavit filed in the case, Masoud said the operation was ordered by Libyan intelligence, and Gaddafi thanked him and the rest of the team afterwards.
Some have questioned the legality of Mas’oud’s handover, given the role of informal armed groups and the lack of an official extradition process.
Mr Harchaoui said Masoud’s extradition showed the US was condoning what he said was a violation.
“What foreign countries are doing is they’re saying we don’t care how the sausage is made,” he said.
“We got what we liked.”
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