Libya: Police admit kidnapping spy chief daughter

LIBYA’S elite police unit has admitted that it was behind the kidnapping of the daughter of Muammar Gaddafi’s former spy chief Abdullah Senussi earlier this week, dealing a new blow to an already crisis-torn government.

Muammar Gaddafi's former spy chief Abdullah al-Senussi. His daughter was kidnapped by Libyan police, it has been revealed. Picture: Reuters

Anoud Senussi was seized by gunmen from a convoy of ministry of justice police taking her to Tripoli airport on Monday, apparently without prime minister Ali Zaidan knowing about it. On Wednesday night her tribe, the Magratha, occupied the power station controlling Tripoli’s water supply, threatening to cut the pipeline unless she was found.

Hours later the First Reinforcement Brigade of the Supreme Security Committee, Libya’s gendarmerie, said they were holding Ms Senussi under house arrest.

“We were acting in the interest of the public and of public safety,” said a statement from the brigade. “Officials from the prison facility had planned to kidnap her and hand her over to a group.”

Ms Senussi, 22, was kidnapped after being released from a ten-month prison sentence after entering Libya on a false passport last year, apparently to visit her father who is in jail awaiting war crimes trial.

A video was released yesterday showing her, wearing a black dress, being interviewed by her captors. On the tape she insists she is in good health and said: “They treated me like they would treat their sisters.”

Hana Sallah of Human Rights Watch, who met Ms Senussi during her imprisonment last month, branded the admission “stranger than fiction” and said she was trying to make contact with the detainee.

“I’m hoping to see what the basis of her detention is,” she told The Scotsman.

Libya’s prime minister Ali Zaidan had earlier condemned the kidnapping, but his office said yesterday it had “no information” on the news that police were behind it.

The incident underlines the lack of government control over the galaxy of police, army and militia units formally under its command.

It it comes with Libya facing economic disaster as armed groups continue to blockade oil ports, accusing the government of mis-spending the country’s bumper oil revenues.

With tribes in the west and south now joining the eastern blockade, Libya’s oil production is now at a tenth of normal levels.

Meanwhile eastern Libya is convulsed in a war between the army and radical militias, with a wave of bombings and assassinations, and claims a senior al- Qaeda leader was killed in fighting in Gaddafi’s home town, Sirte, earlier in the week.

In the capital, many embassies observe a night-time curfew after a string of attacks on diplomatic vehicles, the latest an ambush of a security vehicle guarding the EU ambassador.

Libya’s credibility on the world stage is likely to suffer a fresh blow later this month when it puts Senussi and Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al Islam, on trial for war crimes, in open defiance of a ruling by the International Criminal Court to hand them over to The Hague.