Tag Archives: tripoli

1996: The Abu Salim prison massacre

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On this date in 1996, Muammar Qaddafi‘s Libya massacred hundreds of prisoners in mass shootings at Tripoli’s notorious prison Abu Salim.

Human Rights Watch has charged that the death toll might surpass 1,200 although the government’s long-term stonewalling has helped to obscure the scale.

The day prior, inmates had seized a guard to protest poor prison conditions. Qaddafi’s own brother-in-law Abdullah Senussi was dispatched to negotiate a settlement. It was a simple arrangement: release the guard. Have some grievances redressed.

The guard was duly released, in good faith.

And by way of reciprocity, Senussi unleashed a general slaughter. Multiple prisoners have given accounts to human rights investigators of mass murders, inmates “lined up and shot, execution-style, by young conscripts whose choices were shoot, or stand with them to be shot” and buzzard squads picking through the groaning heaps of bullet-riddled men to administer coups de grace. A kitchen worker quoted by this 2001 BBC Witness broadcast who described how

soldiers in khaki uniforms fired upon the prisoners in the courtyard from the rooftops with automatic weapons and then followed through with pistols, individual shots, and killed what he claimed were 1,200 of his fellow prisoners … the number came to him based on the amount of meals he said he had prepared prior to the incident, and thereafter.

Senussi, who was Qaddafi’s spy chief, was at last notice under sentence of death himself in post-Qaddafi Libya.


“The people want the death penalty for Abdullah Senussi for the Abu Salim massacre” reads the poster, according to the BBC.

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2010: 18 in Libya

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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.

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