US court hears torture case against Libyan warlord Haftar

The plaintiffs’ suit, brought earlier this year under a seldom-used law, accuses Haftar, a dual Libyan and US citizen and former Virginia resident, of extrajudicial killings and torture.

The 1991 Torture Victims Protection Act allows survivors of those crimes to sue foreign authorities for damages in US courts.

Haftar's lawyers did not appear at the first hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, which dealt mainly with procedural questions, such as determining service and damages. Judge Leonie Brinkema could soon grant a default judgement, as Hifter and his sons failed to respond to the suit by the deadline.

“A substantial award will send a message ... that Haftar doesn't have free rein to commit atrocities while retaining US citizenship,” Kevin Carroll, a Washington lawyer with the firm Wiggin and Dana who represents the plaintiffs, told the court.

Haftar’s connections and properties in suburban Virginia give the federal court jurisdiction to prosecute his offenses, the plaintiffs’ lawyers argue. The families seek up to $85 million in damages from Haftar and his two sons, Khalid and Saddam, who helped lead his 2014 offensive in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.

“Every day I have this pain, the kind that stays with you after so much loss,” said Muna al-Suyid, a former human rights lawyer in Libya who filed the suit on behalf of her father and three brothers killed in Haftar’s campaign. “But worse is feeling unable to do anything about it.”

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The plaintiffs are pushing for justice they’ve been denied at home, where the war has plunged large swaths of the country into lawlessness. Human rights campaigners see the case as a way to document atrocities for a reckoning when the war one day ends.

Al-Suyid alleges that on 15 October 2014, an armed group affiliated with Haftar’s forces stormed her family’s home in Benghazi. Two of her brothers were gunned down. Fighters looted the house, set fire to it, and abducted her father and another brother. Their battered bodies were later found in a dump, bullets lodged in their heads and kneecaps.

At that time, three years after the NATO-backed ouster of dictator Muammar Gaddafi, fighting was ripping Benghazi apart. Haftar, a Gaddafi-era general who defected in the 1980s and returned for the 2011 uprising, had declared a war on extremists, but he also went after dissenters.

“Anyone who opposed his military coalition was targeted,” said Hanan Salah, a Libya researcher for Human Rights Watch. Over 90,000 fled the onslaught, the UN refugee agency reported, many to anti-Haftar strongholds in west Libya.

The al-Suyids fought in the 2011 rebellion and rejected Haftar’s strongman grip, which reminded them of Gaddafi. The al-Krshinys, the other family in the US suit, originally hailed from the western city of Misrata, a bastion of resistance to Haftar, though they had worked as merchants in Benghazi for decades.

Two days after the destruction of the al-Suyid house, Abdalla al-Krshiny watched a militia burn his home to cinders. He says he and his five brothers were driven to different prisons. Two turned up dead, shot at close range. Another brother’s leg was shot and crudely amputated. Yet another was given electric shocks while standing in water for hours, the lawsuit said, and lost his eye because of the beatings.

The plaintiffs’ accounts are corroborated by fighters’ cellphone footage and records of directives that indicate the killings had been planned by Haftar and high-level officials.

Over the years, the al-Suyid and al-Krshiny families filed petitions before a court in the Libyan capital of Tripoli, which falls under the jurisdiction of a UN-supported government of Haftar’s rivals. They gave testimony to investigators with the United Nations and International Criminal Court in the Hague. But their efforts only backfired, drawing death threats from Haftar’s officers. They were determined to find another way.

“Sometimes, you ask yourself, how did that person get radicalised? How did he walk into a street and blow himself up?” said al-Krshiny. “Without a system of justice, there is only revenge.”

Carmen Cheung, legal director of the San Francisco-based Center for Justice and Accountability described civil suits in US courts as one step in a long struggle, “to establish a historical record where there had been none.”

As a defendant, Haftar is “extremely unusual,” said Carroll, the lawyer. Although the chances of financial recoveries are typically slim in civil suits, the family’s assets lend teeth to the case, he said.

A spokesman for Haftar did not respond to a request for comment.

In the 1980s, Haftar and 350 of his troops were taken prisoner in a disastrous war in Chad, disavowed by Gaddafi and eventually airlifted to Virginia by the CIA, which wanted their help in a Libyan coup, said Derek Henry Flood, a security analyst who has studied Haftar’s career. But the plot failed. Haftar gained citizenship and settled in Falls Church and Vienna, Virginia, near the CIA headquarters. His sons bought up 17 properties in cash from 2014-2017, worth at least $8 million, the lawsuit says.

In recent weeks, Haftar, 76, has suffered setbacks, namely the failure of his forces’ 14-month campaign to capture Tripoli from their rivals. But there is little indication that he or others in Libya could be held accountable soon. Libyan authorities have failed to act on arrest warrants issued by the International Criminal Court for several high-level officials.

A separate US suit filed against Haftar over his campaign to take Tripoli was dealt a blow earlier this spring, when a federal magistrate in Virginia argued that shelling of civilian neighbourhoods did not constitute extrajudicial killing. The judge has yet to rule on the case.

But this lawsuit has caught the attention of Washington, where alarm is growing about the conflict’s descent into a proxy war.

Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, who is following the case, believes evidence of rights violations and alleged use of Russian mercenaries and weapons “counter any suggestion that Haftar could ever be a viable partner for the US or any other democracy.”

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