Tag Archives: benghazi

1984: Sadiq Hamed Al-Shuwehdy, live from Benghazi

Posted on by

On this date in 1984, Libyan television broadcast the live hanging of dissident engineer Sadiq Hamed Al-Shuwehdy (or Shwehdi). Needless to say, the embed following is Mature Content.

Arrested a couple of months previous protesting against the government of Muammar Qaddafi, Al-Shuwehdy was horribly exhibited bound and kneeling at the center of a Benghazi basketball stadium packed with students surprised to discover they were about to witness a public execution. There he vainly pled for mercy while Qaddafi loyalists chanted for his death — during Ramadan, no less. It remains one of the most viscerally memorable atrocities of the colonel’s 42-year reign.

As the prey strangled slowly on his noose, a monstrously opportunistic university student named Huda Ben Amer vaulted herself to instant national fame or infamy by rushing out of the crowd and pulling on Al-Shuwehdy’s legs to kill him. “Huda Al-Shannaga” — “Huda the Executioner” — earned the eye of the dictator who was himself watching the broadcast, and was quickly elevated into powerful posts in the Libyan government. She was mayor of Benghazi until the 2011 civil war.

On this day..

2010: 18 in Libya

Posted on by

Last year on this date, Libya — having just days prior been controversially elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council* — celebrated by conducting 18 firing squad executions.

State media reported that 14 were shot in Tripoli, and four more in Benghazi, in unspecified cases that Amnesty International “fear[ed] … fail to satisfy international standards for fair trial.”

Among them were nationals of Nigeria, Chad, and Egypt who, particularly in the first case, might have been condemned at a tribunal entirely conducted in a language they could not understand.

Qaddafi’s Libya has always been opaque about its practice of capital punishment; if it met the international outcry for more information about these 18, this site is not aware of it.

But as with Libya’s neighbor in the so-called Arab Spring, it’s one small reminder that what goes around occasionally (maybe) comes around too.

* In view of the current unpleasantness, Tripoli has recently been suspended from the body.

On this day..