Libya receives Senussi from Mauritania

Muammar Gaddafi's former spy chief Abdullah al-Senussi Mauritanian authorities have handed over Muammar Gaddafi's former spy chief Abdullah al-Senussi to Libya nearly five months after he was arrested for entering the country illegally, announced the Libyan Prime Minister Abdelrahim al-Kib on Wednesday.
Senussi arrived in Libya on Wednesday morning after he was interrogated in Mauritania by a Lebanese delegation over the incident of the disappearance of the Lebanese Shiite cleric Moussa al-Sadr while he was visiting Libya in 1978.
A delegation from Libya, including the defence minister and army chief of staff, were in Mauritania's capital Nouakchott on Tuesday for a visit which several official sources said was in connection with the extradition.
Senussi, the brother-in-law and feared former right-hand man of the slain Libyan leader Muammer Gaddafi, was arrested in Mauritania in March and charged two months later for illegal entry and use of forged travel documents.
In July, Libya's new authorities dispatched Prime Minister Abdelrahim al-Kib to Nouakchott to press for the handover, but Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, Mauritania's president, said Senussi had to face justice for illegally entering the country.
On June 27, 2011, the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for Senussi saying he was an indirect perpetrator of crimes against humanity, of murder and persecution based on political grounds in the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi.
Senussi is the target of another international arrest warrant after a Paris court sentenced him in absentia to life in prison for involvement in the bombing of a French UTA airliner over Niger in September 1989.
The plane was carrying 170 people from Brazzaville to Paris via N'Djamena.
That attack, along with the bombing of a Pan Am jumbo jet over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988 in which 270 people were killed - led to a UN-mandated air blockade on Libya in 1992.
Rights group Amnesty International reacted negatively to the news of Senussi's extradition, immediately questioning Libya's ability to afford him a proper hearing.
"Instead of extraditing Abdullah Al-Senussi back to Libya, where he faces an unfair trial and the death penalty for ordinary crimes under national law, Mauritania should have given precedence to the ICC's warrant," said Marek Marczyñski, Amnesty's Justice Research, Policy and Campaign Manager.
Responding to these worries, Prime Minister Abdelrahim al-Kib insisted that Senussi will receive a fair trial inside Libya.
Al-Kib gave his remarks at a press conference held in Tripoli on Wednesday, which he attended by himself along with government spokesman Nasser al-Manaa and army Chief of Staff Yussef Mangoush.
"Senussi will receive a fair trial in Libya," al-Kib said.
On the other hand, a Pro-Gaddafi Mauritanian group has strongly condemned the Mauritanian government's decision to hand over Senussi to Libya, a decision the group said was against all the international laws and humanitarian values.
The group called The Downright Democracy said that the Mauritanian government made a fatal error by extraditing Senussi to a country ruled by gangs, where there is no state, logic or law.
However, the leading figure in the Mauritanian opposition, Mostafa Ould Badreddine agreed on the Mauritanian government's move, but said it was supposed to be done by the judicial authorities and according to the law instead of doing it in this 'illegal way'.
Senussi is wanted in Libya for crimes committed both before and during last year's pro-democracy uprising. Most notoriously, he has been held responsible for the 1996 Abu Salim Prison Massacre, in which 1,200 inmates were killed following an attempted breakout.