An Islamist armed group carried out a videotaped execution of an Egyptian man in a soccer stadium in Libya, in what Amnesty International said on Friday highlighted the country’s descent into lawlessness.
The video of the execution in the eastern city of Derna was posted on social media Web sites, including YouTube.
Amnesty International said it was carried out on Tuesday, apparently by an extremist militant group, the Shura Council of Islamic Youth, in front of a crowd seated in the stadium.
“This unlawful killing realizes the greatest fears of ordinary Libyans, who in parts of the country find themselves caught between ruthless armed groups and a failed state,” Amnesty International’s Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui said.
“Such acts can only lead to further human rights abuses in Derna, where residents have no recourse to state institutions and therefore no means to seek justice or effective protection from abuses,” she added.
“The Libyan authorities, with the support of the international community, must urgently address the breakdown of law and order that has persisted in Derna and elsewhere following the end of [former Libyan leader] Colonel [Muammar] Qaddafi’s rule,” she said.
In the video, the Egyptian, named as Mohamed Ahmed Mohamed, is brought into the stadium blindfolded on a truck.
He is forced to kneel and a statement is read out accusing him of killing a Libyan, Amnesty said.
A gun is then passed to an unmasked man wearing plainclothes, believed to be the brother of the dead Libyan, who then shoots the Egyptian from behind.
Since the fall of long-time leader Qaddafi in a NATO-backed 2011 uprising, interim authorities have failed to establish order and security in a country prone to anarchy and deadly violence.
They have been unable to restrain a large number of militias formed by ex-rebels who formerly fought Qaddafi and who still hold sway across parts of Libya.
Since the middle of last month, Libya has been rocked by fierce and deadly fighting between militias that has prompted an exodus of foreign nationals from the oil-rich North African country.
Amnesty said armed Islamists in Derna “appear to have taken advantage of the breakdown of the rule of law to assert their control, in an apparent attempt to enforce their own interpretation” of Islamic sharia laws.
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
UNDER INVESTIGATION: Members of the local Muslim community had raised concerns with the police about the boy, who officials said might have been radicalized online A 16-year-old boy armed with a knife was shot dead by police after he stabbed a man in the Australian west coast city of Perth, officials said yesterday. The incident occurred in the parking lot of a hardware store in suburban Willetton on Saturday night. The teen attacked the man and then rushed at police officers before he was shot, Western Australian Premier Roger Cook told reporters. “There are indications he had been radicalized online,” Cook told a news conference, adding that it appeared he acted alone. A man in his 30s was found at the scene with a stab wound to his back.