Libya starts Gaddafi trial talks

The fate of captured Libyan dictator’s son Saif al-Islam Gaddafi was being worked out today by international justice officials and the country’s rulers.

The International Criminal Court’s prosecutor Luis Moreno-Ocampo arrived in Tripoli for talks about plans to put Saif on trial there.

He is being held by fighters in the mountain town of Zintan, south-west of the capital.

The ICC has charged him with unleashing a campaign of murder and torture to suppress the uprising against the Gaddafi regime that broke out in mid-February.

Mr Moreno-Ocampo, said he “must face justice”.

Rights groups have called on Libya to hand Saif over for trial in The Hague, and Mr Moreno-Ocampo stressed that even if Libyans want to try the two men in Libya they must still cooperate with the world’s first permanent war crimes tribunal.

Libya is obliged by a Security Council resolution to work with the court, but that does not necessarily preclude a trial in Libya. If the National Transitional Council can convince judges in The Hague that the country has a functioning legal system that will give Saif a fair trial the ICC could turn the case over to Libya.

Saif, once the face of reform in Libya and who led his father’s drive to emerge from pariah status over the last decade, was captured on Saturday by fighters from Zintan who had tracked him to the desert in the south of the country.

In new video footage taken the day of his capture Saif warns that Libya’s regions that united to oust Gaddafi will turn against each other “in a couple of months or maximum one year”, suggesting the country will descend into infighting.

There have been signs in recent months of growing tensions among Libya’s powerful regions, and even after Gaddafi’s fall in August and after his capture and killing in October, the country’s numerous and sometime competing revolutionary factions have refused to disarm, raising fears of new violence and instability. The regions, backed by bands of armed fighters, are able to act autonomously, even on issues of the highest national interest.