Libyan detainees being tortured to death; Doctors Without Borders refuse to take part in torture and quit
From BBC:
And more on MSF (Doctors Without Borders) from The Telegraph:Several people have died after being tortured by militias in Libyan detention centres, human rights group Amnesty International has said.
It claimed to have seen patients in Tripoli, Misrata and Gheryan with open wounds to their head, limbs and back.
Meanwhile, charity Medecins Sans Frontieres has suspended operations in Misrata after treating 115 patients with torture-related wounds.
The UN says it is concerned about the conditions in which patients are held.
"The torture is being carried out by officially recognised military and security entities as well as by a multitude of armed militias operating outside any legal framework," a spokesman for London-based Amnesty said.
"After all the promises to get detention centres under control, it is horrifying to find that there has been no progress to stop the use of torture," Donatella Rovera, from the charity, said.
Medecins Sans Frontieres said it was being "exploited" as some patients were being brought to them between interrogation sessions.
"Our role is to provide medical care to war casualties and sick detainees, not to repeatedly treat the same patients between torture sessions," said general director Christopher Stokes.
More than 8,500 detainees, most of them accused of being loyal to former Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi, are being held by militia groups in about 60 centres, according to UN human rights chief Navi Pillay.
I knew that the NTC would be incapable of any central governance (their officials can't even operate safely in Tripoli) and violence would continue for quite some time after Gaddafi's death, but the fact that close to 10,000 detainees are being held in around 60 sites in a country of just over 6 million, many merely on the suspicion of being Gaddafi loyalists or based just on skin color, is appalling.MSF said it was withdrawing staff because it was effectively keeping prisoners alive so that authorities could continue to torture them.
The withdrawal came as Amnesty International reported separately that up to a dozen people had died after being tortured at the hand of the new National Military Security agency.
Senior UN figures expressed concern over the government's failure to exert control over militias, accused of rampant abuse of the estimated 8,500 held in arbitrary detention.
Christopher Stokes, the General Director of MSF, said the scale of torture in two detention centres in the city of Misurata was accelerating despite repeated pleas from the organisation for mistreatment to stop.
Some of the 115 inmates among the 1,500 strong prison population that MSF staff treated after torture were beaten so badly they could not stand, had suffered kidney failure and bore signs of electric shock.
Hundreds of prisoners, many of them black Africans, also told the organisation of suffering torture.
Mr Stokes said MSF medics feared that their work could be used to sustain the process of torturing prisoners. "When you patch people up and then they get taken back to be tortured again in the same evening, you become part of the process," he said.
"We have protested and in some cases they have said they will stop but in other cases they say it happens everywhere, like Abu Ghraib. If anything, the number of cases has been accelerating."
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Originally Posted by Markas
