Tripoli: Libyans took part in the US raid in Tripoli that captured senior Al Qaida operative Abu Anas Al Libi, his son said on Sunday.
“Those who kidnapped my father are Libyans. They looked like Libyans and spoke in the Libyan dialect,” Abdullah Al Raghie told reporters.
Better known by his nom de guerre, Al Libi’s real name was Nazih Abdul Hamid Al Raghie.
Abdullah said the gunmen who seized his father were armed with pistols with silencers and that some of them wore masks.
“The whole thing was recorded by a surveillance camera,” said Abdullah, speaking from the family home in Nofleine, just five kilometres south of Tripoli’s city centre.
“We gave the tape to friends so that they can try to investigate.”
Abdullah said he does not trust the Libyan government, which he believes is implicated in his father’s disappearance.
Libyan authorities insist they were unaware of the special forces operation that captured Al Libi, an Al Qaida operative indicted in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in east Africa.
Libi was seized on the streets of Tripoli and whisked out of the country early on Saturday. A source close to Libi said he was “kidnapped” while returning from dawn prayers.
As he tried to park his car outside his home three vehicles surrounded it and masked men jumped out, shattering the driver’s side window and pulling Libi out with “extreme rapidity,” the source said.
The Pentagon later confirmed his capture in a “US counterterrorism operation,” which capped a decade-long manhunt for one of the last remaining high-level operatives from the core terror network established by Osama Bin Laden in the 1990s.
The Pentagon provided few details about how Al Libi was seized and by whom, saying only that he was being “lawfully detained under the law of war in a secure location” outside Libya.
On Sunday, Tripoli said it had demanded an explanation from Washington over the “kidnap” of one of its citizens.
Al Libi’s brother, Nabih Al Raghie, meanwhile said his sibling was the victim of “an act of piracy” carried out by foreign forces.
